Atlantic Hurricanes Preseason 2025
Ten Graphs Tell the Story
There has been no tropical cyclone of hurricane strength anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere so far in 2025. If we get to June 5th — which looks quite possible if not probable — then 2025 will have the latest date on record (since 1970) for the first NH hurricane, breaking the record of Ava, which reached hurricane strength in the Eastern Pacific on June 4th, 1973 (thanks to Ryan Maue for confirming — Give his excellent weather Substack a follow).
What does breaking a long-standing record of annual-to-date hurricane inactivity that has stood for 52 years tell us about the detection and attribution of changes in hurricane climatology?
Well . . . nothing.
Motivated by a recent commentary in Nature on Atlantic hurricanes that was all opinion and no data, in advance of the official 2025 North Atlantic hurricane season I thought I’d do a post on hurricanes that was all data and no opinion. The 2025 hurricane season begins on Sunday, June 1.
Enjoy!
Head here to read the latest (20 Nov 2024) NOAA GFDL assessment of what is known, unknown, and hypothesized about North Atlantic hurricanes and climate change.
The NOAA GFDL bottom line:
In summary, it is premature to conclude with high confidence that human-caused increases in greenhouse gases have caused a change in past Atlantic basin hurricane activity that is outside the range of natural variability, although greenhouse gases are strongly linked to global warming.
Read more of our peer-reviewed research (and plenty more can be found here):
Weinkle, J., Landsea, C., Collins, D., Musulin, R., Crompton, R. P., Klotzbach, P. J., & Pielke Jr, R. (2018). Normalized hurricane damage in the continental United States 1900–2017. Nature Sustainability, 1(12), 808-813.
Klotzbach, P. J., Bowen, S. G., Pielke Jr, R., & Bell, M. (2018). Continental US hurricane landfall frequency and associated damage: Observations and future risks. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 99(7), 1359-1376.
Weinkle, J., Maue, R., & Pielke Jr, R. (2012). Historical global tropical cyclone landfalls. Journal of Climate, 25(13), 4729-4735.
Crompton, R. P., Pielke, R. A., & McAneney, K. J. (2011). Emergence timescales for detection of anthropogenic climate change in US tropical cyclone loss data. Environmental Research Letters, 6(1), 014003.
Thanks for reading — comments and questions welcomed!
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You persist in throwing boring facts in the path of dramatic journalism. ;-)
Thanks for the data. Pictures speak louder than words.
I did find it odd that NOAA ended their statement with “ although greenhouse gases are strongly linked to global warming”. What does this have to do with the previous comments? And why is it that articles or papers with similar findings (i.e. nothing to see here) put in a comment “but climate change…”? Is this a requirement for publication?