The 2025 hurricane season is drawing to a close without a single one making landfall in the continental United States — for the first time in a decade.
After developing in tropical Atlantic waters near the equator, multiple storms this year initially appeared to be following paths that could have taken them toward the U.S. East Coast. But as they got closer, all of the systems that formed since the start of the season on June 1 ultimately veered northward and traveled back out to sea.
“They began to turn northward, away from the U.S. coastline, over and over again. We saw that repeatedly,” said Greg Postel, a meteorologist at The Weather Channel. “It was really the dominant mode of the hurricane tracks this year.”
It was an unusual phenomenon, at least compared with recent years. Postel said many who studied this hurricane season will likely remember it as “the year of the ‘recurvature,'” which is when hurricanes “curve” away from land instead of striking it. That pattern can result from a variety of atmospheric conditions interacting with each other, according to Postel and other experts.
Winds and air pressure
All told, this hurricane season brought 13 named storms — four of which were major hurricanes. September and October saw four hurricanes alone, with the last one, Hurricane Melissa, striking Jamaica as one of the strongest on record.
But none of those hurricanes hit the U.S. directly. Only a single tropical storm, Chantal, came ashore in July near Litchfield Beach, South Carolina, causing flash floods that knocked out power, damaged buildings and left at least four people dead, authorities said at the time.
Atlantic hurricanes this year tended to “recurve” as they neared the East Coast of the U.S., turning northward before reaching land and, eventually, traveling back out to sea.
NOAA/National Weather Service/National Hurricane Center
And while there’s technically still time for another hurricane before the season officially ends on Nov. 30, a named storm hasn’t formed this late in the year since at least 1991, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Experts point to winds and air pressure as key factors in this year’s hurricane movement.
Hurricanes tend to travel westward from an origin point in the tropical Atlantic, but certain atmospheric conditions that steer the storms in one direction or another can cause them to “recurve” toward the east, said Matthew Rosencrans, the lead hurricane season forecaster at the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center. Those conditions essentially sweep hurricanes northward, parallel to the East Coast of the U.S., before pushing them back out to sea.
“When I look at the steering currents, the winds that determine where the hurricanes go at the core of the season, there was basically a big upper-level trough — an area of low pressure that hung out over the eastern U.S.,” Rosencrans told CBS News. “It’s spinning out there, and it’s picking up these storms and causing them to go more to the north rather than continue their track to the west and potentially enter the Caribbean or the Gulf, at which point they’re almost guaranteed to hit the U.S.”
The area of low pressure weakened part of something known as the Bermuda High, which is among the leading forces influencing a hurricane’s path. Where and when a hurricane is steered, and whether it travels northward, depends on the strength and location of the Bermuda High during a hurricane season, according to NOAA’s hurricane research division.
Also called a “subtropical high,” the Bermuda High is a ridge of high pressure in the North Atlantic where air circulates in a clockwise direction. A strong Bermuda High pushes hurricanes farther west before turning them northward, toward Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, whereas a weaker Bermuda high turns them northward sooner, either toward the East Coast or out to sea.
The upper-level trough that lingered over the East Coast took shape in tandem with a dip in the jet stream, which together produced a low-pressure area close to the surface of the ocean just several hundred miles from land, said Rosencrans. That weakened the western part of the Bermuda High, just several hundred miles from the shores of the continental U.S., and pushed the high-pressure ridge in the opposite direction.
Postel noted that such a pattern in the jet stream “is very good at deflecting incoming tropical systems out to sea.”
“Why [the dip in the jet stream] was there globally, in the sort of scheme of the general circulation, is not entirely clear, but it’s certainly something that characterized this hurricane season,” he said. “Because without it, without that trough there in those crucial moments, we would have looked back on this hurricane season very, very differently.”
Previous years without continental U.S. landfalls
A full season without any hurricane landfalls isn’t unheard of, although it is fairly uncommon. In the last 25 years, excluding this one, there were seven in which no hurricanes struck the mainland U.S.: 2000, 2001, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2013 and 2015, according to the hurricane research division at NOAA.
Data show no hurricanes made U.S. landfall in 1990 or 1994, either.
Recent hurricane seasons by the numbers2024: Five hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. There were 19 total named storms, including 11 hurricanes.2023: One hurricane made landfall in the U.S. There were 19 named storms, including seven hurricanes.2022: Two hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. There were 17 named storms, including eight hurricanes.2021: Two hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. There were 21 named storms, including seven hurricanes.2020: Six hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. There were 31 named storms, including 14 hurricanes.2019: Two hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. There were 20 named storms, including six hurricanes.2018: Two hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. There were 16 named storms, including eight hurricanes.2017: Three hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. There were 19 named storms, including 10 hurricanes.2016: Two hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. There were 16 named storms, including seven hurricanes.2015: No hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. There were 12 named storms, including four hurricanes.
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