ByMarshall Shepherd,
Senior Contributor.
The Atlantic hurricane season was more active than you may think, but I will touch on that later in the article. It produced 13 named storms, and three of them reached Category 5. Hurricane Melissa will go down in history as one of the strongest storms on record to make landfall in the Atlantic Basin. As we approach the end of November, it is reasonable to ask whether the Atlantic hurricane season is actually over.
The typical Atlantic hurricane season starts on June 1 and runs through November 30. In the most recent couple of decades, we have seen tropical storms and hurricanes form outside of that range. As I wrote in 2023, a subtropical storm formed in January. The strongest January storm on record, Hurricane Alex, formed in 2016. Tropical Storm Ana (2021) is an example of late spring system with its development within the month of May. Storms occassionally form during December but mostly remain over the ocean. While we reflected on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina this year, 2005 was also the year that we ran out of storm names and had to use the Greek alphabet. Tropical Storm Zeta was the last storm of that year and formed in late December. It actually remained a named storm into January 2006.
