2025 Hurricane Season Wrap-Up

‘Very unusual’ hurricane season comes to an end.

Por University of Miami

25 de November de 2025

The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season marked the first time in 10 years that no hurricane made a U.S. landfall—just one of the oddities of a season that started quietly and ended with the devastation of Hurricane Melissa.

Any gambler with enough gumption to bet the farm that not a single hurricane would make landfall in the U.S. this year would have seemed destined for the poorhouse.

After all, from Irma and Ian to Harvey and Helene, a multitude of massive and menacing storms roared ashore and pummeled U.S. coastal communities over the past few years, making a landfall appear all but certain for the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season.

But mother nature threw us a curveball. None of the five hurricanes that formed this season even sniffed land. A persistent elongated region of low atmospheric pressure centered over the southeast U.S., creating counterclockwise steering winds that directed approaching storms northward before they could reach land.

Another key factor: the location of the North Atlantic subtropical high, a high-pressure system over the Atlantic that influences the movement of tropical cyclones. When the system, which is also known as the Bermuda High, is farther west, it can steer storms toward the U.S. East Coast or Gulf Coast, said Lynn “Nick” Shay, a professor of ocean sciences at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science.

“This season, its positioning and the steering flow seemed to be farther east, allowing curvature away from the Eastern Seaboard,” Shay said.

It marks the first time in a decade that no hurricanes made a U.S. landfall. But that was just one of the oddities in what University hurricane researcher and modeler Andy Hazelton called “a very unusual” season. Three Category 5 hurricanes, a rare interaction between two tropical cyclones, and a hurricane for the record books made it so.

“It was an all-or-nothing season,” said Hazelton, an associate scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS), a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) entity based at the Rosenstiel School. “We had closer to an average number of storms and fewer hurricanes than usual.”

P-3 Orion crew members after a mission into Category 5 Hurricane Melissa. University of Miami/CIMAS researchers Kelly Ryan, right, and Jun Zhang, second from right.

A lull, then a burst of activity

It was a season also characterized by a bewildering lull during what is typically the peak period of activity. Periods of dormancy during a hurricane season, though, are always a possibility, according to Ben Kirtman, dean of the Rosenstiel School and professor of atmospheric sciences, noting that Saharan dust drifting into the Atlantic is one reason for those periods of quiet.

The role that the weather phenomenon known as the Madden-Julian Oscillation, or MJO, also factors in, he said. An eastward moving disturbance of clouds, rainfall, winds, and pressure, the MJO traverses the planet in the tropics and returns to its initial starting point on the order of 30 to 60 days.

“In the case of this year, the quiescent or suppressed phase of the MJO was another mechanism,” Kirtman explained. “The MJO has an active phase, where the background state is favorable for hurricane growth, and an inactive phase that tends to inhibit storm development.”

But while the season had significant lulls, it also featured bursts of activity. “The season had its latest start since 2014,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the Rosenstiel School. “Then, Hurricane Erin exploded into a Category 5 hurricane in mid-August, becoming the earliest Category 5 hurricane to form outside of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Then there was zero activity from Aug. 29 through Sept. 16, the climatological peak of the season.”

The season quickly kicked back into high gear with another Category 5 hurricane—Hurricane Humberto—in late September.

Then came the Fujiwhara effect that likely spared the U.S. from landfalling storm. During the rare meteorological phenomenon, Hurricanes Humberto and Imelda came so close to one another when they churned in the Atlantic basin at the same time in September, they danced around each, the bigger and more powerful Humberto steering Imelda away from the coast.

The season ended tragically when Hurricane Melissa made landfall in southwest Jamaica on Oct. 28 as a Category 5 hurricane, then battered Cuba, Haiti, and parts of the Bahamas, killing close to 100 people.

“Only one other season on record has had three or more Category 5 hurricanes, and that was the infamous hyperactive 2005 season,” McNoldy said. “And tragically, Melissa is also preliminarily tied for the strongest landfalling hurricane anywhere in the Atlantic. It reached an intensity of 185 mile-per-hour sustained winds as it made landfall in Jamaica. The only other known storms to make landfall at such an intensity were the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane in the Florida Keys and Hurricane Dorian in 2019 in the western Bahamas.”

Flying into the heart of storms

Though fewer hurricanes formed than experts predicted, NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters remained active, flying into the heart of storms to deploy dropsondes and drones that gathered and transmitted data forecasters depend on to issue hurricane watches and warnings.

A total of 18 Black Swift drones, for example, flew into the core of several storms this season, measuring pressure, temperature, humidity, and wind speeds during flights that lasted as long as two hours.

“During Hurricanes Gabrielle and Imelda, we used the Black Swift to test a new sampling strategy in which the drone flew in the same location just above the ocean surface to obtain vertical profiles of the atmosphere near an ocean wave buoy,” said Jason Dunion, a meteorologist at CIMAS and with NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division, adding that the measurements collected during those flights will help scientists to better understand the exchange of energy between the warm ocean and the very lowest regions of the hurricane environment.

Kathryn Sellwood, a senior research associate at CIMAS, served as the onboard lead project scientist during hurricane hunter flights into Imelda, playing an instrumental role in conducting two experiments designed to observe the impact of vertical shear on the storm’s development by flying a so-called vortex alignment module. She also served as the lead project scientist from the ground while supporting researchers who flew into Tropical Storm Jerry and Hurricane Erin.

The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season may be in our rear view, but researchers and scientists will stay busy during the offseason. “From analyzing drone data to developing a new physics package for use in models to collaborating with forecasters to determine how to make the best use of drone data for National Hurricane Center operations, we’ll have plenty to keep us busy,” said CIMAS scientist Jun Zhang.

“Our work in the offseason is a key step that ensures the data is later used in journals, in conference presentations, and to conduct research of the highest quality possible,” Dunion said.

A history of UM CIMAS supporting NOAA Hurricane research

From prefight briefings to photo ops in front of a P-3 Orion aircraft to inflight operations that include monitoring radar and gathering data for transmission to forecasters at the National Hurricane Center, Hurricane Hunter deployments are often well-orchestrated affairs staffed with some of University of Miami's finest.

Sunlight fades on the incredibly powerful Hurricane Melissa in the Caribbean Sea.

Footnotes

Production and design by Joshua Prezant. Reporting and writing by Robert C. Jones Jr. Photos and videos courtesy of NOAA, CIMAS, Black Swift Technologies. Jun Zhang, Andy Hazelton, Alexandra Ceurvorst, and Jason Dunion.