14 DAY TRIAL // This year, the Atlantic hurricane season has been pretty busy but what's rather strange is that these huge storms have avoided the United States landfall.
Even though people who expected to see their house taken away by a hurricane are happy about it, the phenomenon is rather unusual.
This year was the first time that during an Atlantic hurricane season with 10 or more hurricanes, none has reached the US, and this since 1900, said storm researcher Adam Lea of the University College London.
He noticed that there is a drop in landfall events in the US, while he was developing graphical mappings of tropical cyclone wind hazards for the insurance industry.
Robert Henson, author of "The Rough Guide to Weather" (Rough Guides, 2002) and writer for the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), agrees and confirms the strangeness of the phenomenon.
“It's quite unusual to have so much activity in the tropical Atlantic with so little impact on the United States.
“This year, there were two systems that brought hurricane-force winds to Canada, two hurricane landfalls in Belize, and one in Mexico, yet no hurricanes reached the United States.”
The reason for this recent lack of hurricanes is the difference in weather patterns, OurAmazingPlanet reports.
Lea said that “the Azores/Bermuda high has been located further east than usual, and there has been anomalous low pressure over the US East Coast.
“This pattern means that storms tend to get steered by upper-level troughs which steer storms away from the US coastline into the open Atlantic.
“In addition, there has been anomalous high pressure over the US Gulf Coast, which has deflected storms into Mexico or towards Cuba.”
Lea got his information from the UNISYS hurricane track dataset, and he adds that even if before the 50s landfall events were underestimated, before this period there was no season with 10 hurricanes and no US landfalls.
His research led him to discover other facts like, for example, since Hurricane Ike in 2008, there have been 16 consecutive hurricanes that haven’t had US landfalls.
The last time this happened was between Irene – in 1999, and Lili – in 2002, and then there were 22 consecutive hurricanes that avoided US landfalls; also between Hurricanes Allen – in 1980) and Alicia – in 1983, with 17 consecutive hurricanes that avoided US landfalls.
It's not sure what this lack of landfalling hurricanes will mean for the next season and as Henson says, “it would be impossible to draw conclusions about future hurricane seasons from this year alone.”