NORFOLK, Va. — As October comes to a close and November begins, hurricane season rolls on. Running a full six months, from June 1st through November 30th, the Atlantic Hurricane Season highlights when tropical activity is most likely. Bookended by June and November, tropical activity typically tends to wane after Halloween. While tropical systems making landfall along the mainland U.S. coast in November are rare, they do occur.
Tropical cyclone recordkeeping officially began in 1851. Since then, nearly 600 tropical systems have been recorded as striking the mainland U.S. But out of all those storms, only a dozen made landfall during the month of November. And none have made landfall in December.
Putting that in perspective and doing a little math, that works out to only 2% of the tropical systems that have made landfall did so after November 1st. And a majority of those systems made landfall in Florida.
The most recent landfalling November storm was Hurricane Nicole in 2022, which made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane on the east coast of Florida, near Vero Beach, on November 10th.
And in 1985, Hurricane Kate hit the Florida panhandle as Category 2 hurricane on November 21st, making Kate the latest hurricane to hit hit the U.S. mainland in a calendar year.
Tropics Right Now
Currently, the Atlantic is quiet, with no tropical development expected in the next week. Long-range computer models do show moderate chances of development in the central and western Caribbean by the middle to the end of next week, but several things have to come together for that system to form. We will continue to monitor the tropics for the remainder of the 2024 Hurricane Season.
