Hurricane Season on the Atlantic Coast of the United States – Watts Up With That?

Brief Note by Kip Hansen — 21 August 2024

It is Hurricane Season in the northern hemisphere.  In the United States, this is a concern almost exclusively of the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf Coasts.  There have been hurricanes landfalling on the Pacific Coast – but very rarely. 

Every news outlet has been repeatedly telling us that NOAA’s National Hurricane Center has predicted “an extremely active hurricane season” for the Atlantic Basin. 

For more than a decade, my wife and I spent hurricane seasons on our sailing catamaran in the Northern Caribbean, when we felt confident, or on the southern Atlantic Coast of the United States, during those hurricane seasons when we felt less confident.   We were hit only once in 12 years, and that was, as you may have guessed, not in the Caribbean but rather up north  in Beaufort, North Carolina by Hurricane Florence. 

Tropical storms and hurricanes that spin out into the Atlantic, without landfall, are of little concern except to shipping.  Like many things, the real trouble occurs at the interfaces of differing dynamical systems, such as where the land meets the sea.

The sailors among you will realize that sailboats can’t outrun hurricanes.  Even motoring, sailboats are generally limited in speed.  So, during hurricane season, we plan ahead so that we find ourselves within a easy passage to a safe-ish hurricane hole.

The big question for sailors and mariners of all types is “Where will we be safe if and when a big storm arrives?”

Here is one way to look at that question:   from NOAA  “Continental United States Hurricane Strikes 1950-2023”

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This NOAA-produced map shows all landfalls of all hurricanes on the East and Gulf Coasts of the United States since 1950. Each of the five categories is shown by a different colored dot.  Note that I have changed the Cat 2 color to pink, making it easier to distinguish from Cat 5 – both had been red originally and I have added the thick dark red line along the coast where hurricanes have not hit in the 74 years since 1950.

In the image above, there are a couple of odd, maybe ‘lucky’,  short stretches on the south-facing Gulf Coast and the west coast of Florida.   

Then there’s East Coast of Florida and Georgia:

The middle “unhit area” includes Cape Canaveral with the Kennedy Space Center.  The northern section is most of the coast of the state of Georgia. 

And then up the coast to the Delmarva Peninsula all the way to Maine.

In the close-up, you can see I missed a bit of ‘coast not hit’ there on the southern shore of Massachusetts—only Hurricane Edna, Cat 2, hitting on Cape Cod’s south shore in 1954.

Some of the this is due to geophysical factors of geology (the shape of the shoreline itself) and prevailing wind/weather/ocean current patterns.  Some of it must be just “not hit yet.”

Notice that the Jersey Shore, that long stretch of barrier islands from Sandy Hook, NJ south through Atlantic City, an almost continuous barrier island/sand bar nearly totally covered with homes and businesses, including Atlantic City, which last suffered a direct hit from a hurricane in 1903, “the first and only known North Atlantic hurricane to make landfall in the state of New Jersey since records were kept starting in 1851.”  Note that former-Hurricane Sandy did strike the Jersey shore in 2012 as a tropical storm – or “Super Storm Sandy”.

Does any of this history mean that the “never hit” areas will be hurricane safe later this year?  Or next year? Or in the next decades?   No, I don’t think so, but I’m willing to hear from those with more knowledge about what drives hurricanes.

Geography seems to protect the eastern-facing shores of Massachusetts and Maine – which, however, do bear the brunt of Nor’Easters, which occur in the opposite season (September through April) from hurricanes.

One last thing:  Tracks of all the known Tropical Storms and Hurricanes:

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Now isn’t that an interesting picture?  Where tropical cyclones originate and where they go – and where they don’t go. 

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Author’s Comment:

I offer no speculation, no theories, no hypotheses, not even any opinions. Only when I am acting as a Captain do I concern myself with hurricane tracks – which means I only look out about five days in advance, which is the limit of hurricane track prediction to any great accuracy – even then, their average prediction of point of landfall is only accurate to about +/- 150 miles.  Any further in advance and it is mostly useless.

Edward Lorenz and Dave Fultz’s dishpan experiments showed quite clearly that these cyclonic storms are chaotic in origin and nature. 

Thanks for reading.

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