Low-Energy Fridays: Where Have All the Hurricanes Gone?

I don’t want to jinx it, but so far this year’s hurricane season has been… nonexistent. While a few tropical storms have formed deep in the Atlantic Ocean, no Atlantic hurricanes have formed—let alone made landfall—as of this writing. We haven’t made it this far into hurricane season without any actual hurricanes since 1914.  September is traditionally peak month for Atlantic hurricanes, so the lack of major storms so far suggests the whole season may end up a dud. 

This lack of hurricanes is certainly good news. (I don’t think it’s a controversial opinion to say hurricanes are bad, considering they have cost the United States $1.5 trillion in damages since 1980.) Nevertheless, I’m curious about why the hurricanes have decided to ghost us this year. After all, aren’t storms supposed to be getting worse? 

Yes and no. While the number of recorded hurricanes each year has increased over the decades, some (if not all) of this increase is due to better detection. Thomas Knutson, a climate modeler with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has noted that increases in Atlantic tropical storm counts are almost entirely due to increases in short-duration storms (less than two days), which were more likely to go unrecorded in earlier decades due to less comprehensive monitoring.  

The amount of damage caused by hurricanes is also increasing, but this may be due to other factors. Wealthier societies tend to suffer greater damage from hurricanes simply because they have more expensive stuff that can be damaged in a storm. Because the United States is much richer now than it was 50 or 100 years ago, the costs imposed by storms have gone up as well. 

Bad policy choices are another reason behind these rising costs. Programs like the National Flood Insurance Program offer insurance policies to people who build or live in vulnerable areas at rates far below those necessary to recoup expected storm losses. This has the perverse effect of encouraging development in hurricane-prone areas, which leads to greater overall damage.  

What about climate change? Global temperatures have continued to rise, and warmer ocean temperatures should theoretically provide more energy to power storms; however, it’s less clear whether this would make hurricanes more frequent or more intense. Higher temperatures might also shift the timing of hurricane season, making later storms more likely. Regardless, whether climate change has had a detectable effect on past hurricanes is a matter of considerable controversy.

The real reasons for the paucity of hurricanes this year are more prosaic. For one thing, this is an El Niño year. (Don’t ask me to explain what that is; I just know it tends to reduce storm activity in the Atlantic.) Hurricanes result from complex, inherently unpredictable systems. While we can make certain statistical predictions about them in the aggregate, you might not have butterflies flapping their wings at the right time to start a storm in a given year. 

The bad news is that this uneventful hurricane season is likely not part of a trend. We will have to deal with the impact of future hurricanes and should prepare for that inevitability. In the meantime, we can enjoy the calm before the (hopefully distant) storm.