Thanks to warm waters and an assist from La Niña, this year’s hurricane season was an active one, and coastal residents have been on edge all summer. But now the winds of winter are slowly winning the battle between the Arctic and the tropics, forcing the Atlantic Ocean’s hurricane season to finally calm down. In honor of 2016’s season, here are some things you might have missed about this year’s storms.
1. THE 2016 HURRICANE SEASON WAS THE MOST ACTIVE SINCE 2012.
If it seemed like we had to deal with a lot of storms this year, it’s only because the past couple of years have been relatively quiet. A “normal” hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean produces 12 named storms, six of which you’d expect to strengthen into hurricanes and three of those hurricanes would reach Category 3 intensity (115 mph) or stronger.
The 2016 Atlantic Hurricane Season, which officially ran from June 1 through November 30, saw 15 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes. The season began with an unusual hurricane in January, an early-season storm in May, and a string of storms that formed throughout the warm summer and fall months. But Hurricane Otto, which formed toward the end of November, was likely the last storm to form in the year.
2. LA NIÑA HELPED ATLANTIC STORMS THRIVE.
One of the major factors that allowed one storm after another to percolate in the Atlantic was the presence of mild La Niña conditions in the eastern Pacific Ocean. It seems odd that cooler-than-normal waters in another ocean would have an impact on the hurricane season across the continent, but everything is connected. La Niña—the presence of abnormally cool waters near the equator in the eastern Pacific Ocean—keeps thunderstorm activity in this part of the world to a minimum, reducing the strong winds that flow east over the Caribbean and typically tear apart tropical cyclones before they have a chance to form. The absence of these winds allow storms to build.
The past couple of hurricane seasons were stifled by the opposite phenomenon—an El Niño—which created unusually high levels of wind shear over the Atlantic. Many of the storms that formed this year also had to battle strong wind shear, but it usually let up enough for most of them to strengthen before hitting land.
3. THE SOUTHEAST TOOK A BEATING THIS YEAR.
The United States only saw a handful of landfalls over the past couple of years, but this year was different. Five of the ten storms that made landfall somewhere around the Atlantic Ocean this year hit the United States, and all of those storms came ashore either in Florida or South Carolina. There’s no particular reason that storms kept targeting the same areas this year—each storm was different and they all took advantage of different environmental factors that allowed them to hit the same spots over and over again.
Unfortunately, none of the five landfalling storms took the right track to help alleviate the historic drought that’s plaguing interior parts of the southeast. Tropical cyclones that come ashore along the northern Gulf Coast or the southern Atlantic coast are a big source of rainfall for states like Alabama and Georgia, but this year drought-stricken areas have had to go without this plentiful supply of tropical moisture.
4. BERMUDA GOT HIT HARD, TOO.
It’s not just the southeastern United States that got it bad this year. Bermuda is a tiny island—just a little smaller than Manhattan—that sits a few hundred miles off the coast of North Carolina. They’ve had some pretty close calls in the past, but it’s hard for the center of a hurricane to hit this small speck in the middle of a vast ocean.
Hard as it is, Hurricane Nicole managed to do just that this year, with the eye of this major hurricane passing directly over the island and its 65,000 residents. The entire island experienced wind gusts of more than 100 mph while the eye passed overhead. Thankfully, Bermuda is resilient and well-prepared for bad storms, so damage from this storm was relatively minimal.
Nicole wasn’t the only storm to hit Bermuda in recent years. Hurricanes Fay and Gonzalo both made landfall on the island nation during the same week in October 2014; this back-to-back blow caused extensive damage across the island. Hurricane Joaquin in October 2015 also came perilously close to the island, causing some minor damage as it passed the west of the island.
5. HURRICANE MATTHEW WAS HISTORICALLY HORRIFIC.
The worst storm of the year was Hurricane Matthew, a monstrous Category 5 hurricane that exploded in the Caribbean and came within miles of causing a catastrophe in the United States. Matthew was originally forecast to remain a minimal hurricane as it entered the central Caribbean Sea at the beginning of September, but the storm took advantage of calm winds, ample moisture, and record-warm ocean waters to exceed forecasts beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.
Matthew rapidly grew from a strong tropical storm with 70 mph winds to a scale-topping beast with 160 mph winds in just 24 hours, and it maintained that strength as it closed in on the Greater Antilles. The hurricane crashed into Haiti on October 5 as a strong Category 4 storm, causing unspeakable destruction to the small towns that dot the hillsides on the country’s western shores. Entire towns were leveled by Matthew’s intense winds and storm surge, and some estimates figure that more than 1000 people died as a result.
It looked like Hurricane Matthew would repeat its destruction by making landfall in Florida as a major hurricane, but the powerful core of the storm stayed just a few miles offshore as it paralleled the Florida shoreline, sparing most coastal communities from the worst effects. Matthew eventually came inland in South Carolina, where the main threat transitioned from wind to flooding. Even still, eastern parts of North Carolina were devastated by the worst flooding in recent memory after the storm dropped more than a foot of rain in some locations. The floods killed dozens of people and caused so much damage that some school districts couldn’t restart classes until nearly three weeks after the hurricane.
6. HURRICANE OTTO MADE AN UNUSUAL MOVE.
The last storm of the season was also a bit surprising in that it strengthened far beyond what forecasters initially expected. The hurricane developed from an area of disturbed weather that sat off the coast of Nicaragua for a week, then quickly spinning itself into a borderline major hurricane before making landfall near the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
Most storms dissipate when they move inland, but Otto retained its hurricane strength as it moved across Nicaragua, and its eye emerged in the eastern Pacific Ocean a day later. Hurricane Otto is only the seventh storm in recorded history to move across Central America from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and only the second storm to maintain its strength as it crossed land. The most recent storm to accomplish this feat was Hurricane Cesar-Douglas, 20 years earlier in 1996. Cesar-Douglas has two names because convention at the time was to rename a storm once it crossed ocean basins—it was called Cesar in the Atlantic and renamed Douglas once it moved into the Pacific.
December 16, 2016 – 2:00pm
