Breaking Down the 2024 Atlantic Hurricane Season
Bottom Line: Pick your meteorological prognosticator of choice and you’ll have had essentially an identical forecast. This hurricane season was projected to be one of the busiest on record. The 2023 hurricane season brought us an above average season with 20 named storms, coming into this season we’d been conditioned for a worse season this year. Quoting AccuWeather’s preseason forecast (which proved to be the most colorful rhetorically as they used the term “explosive” in the headline to their forecast) said this... A super-charged hurricane season could spawn a near-record number of storms in the Atlantic this year, and forecasters may even run out of names for storms amid a frenzy of tropical systems. NOAA’s forecast, while less colorful in the language, used to describe it, called for 17-25 named storms this season. Virtually identical to the 20-25 named storms projected by AccuWeather.
As we’re wrapping up hurricane season this week, with no additional activity that will be taking place, we did have an above-average season – though we didn’t experience anywhere near record setting activity. That was the case despite Florida’s unfortunate luck of being in the crosshairs of three hurricanes. With 18 named storms this season, this year will finish tied with 1969 & 2018 for the eleventh busiest season on record – twelve storms behind 2020’s record season.
According to the NHC heading into this season we were expected to see:
- 17-25 named storms (actual 18)
- 8-13 hurricanes (actual 11)
- 4-7 major hurricanes (actual 5)
Total activity came in at the low end of NOAA’s guidance and below the mid-point of their expectations. With that said, their guidance was essentially spot on with the expected number of hurricanes including majors.
In the end this season was above average, but thankfully it was at the lowest end of the projected range of the National Hurricane Center and far from being one of the busiest. As I noted numerous times throughout the year, there’s a connection between increased Saharan dust activity due to climate change and fewer than expected named storms. That’s something worth watching in future years and cycles as well.