Here's When The Last Storm Of Hurricane Season Typically Forms

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A​reas of Florida, Puerto Rico and Atlantic Canada hard-hit by hurricanes Ian or Fiona are ready for hurricane season to end.

At this point, hurricane fatigue might be setting in no matter where you live. This may cause you to wonder: When will the Atlantic hurricane season end?

(​MORE: Why Fiona And Ian Will Likely Be Retired)

The answer: The Atlantic hurricane season officially runs through the end of November. But it's not as simple as that.

Even though the season technically ends on November 30, the season's last storm typically happens before then.

S​o here's a ray of light, that an "earlier" end to the hurricane season could be in sight.

L​ate October Drop Off

T​he Atlantic hurricane season runs from June through November to encompass over 97% of Atlantic storms, according to NOAA's Hurricane Research Division.

A​s you can see in the graph below, seasonal activity drops sharply from the mid-September peak into November.

This happens because, while ocean water remains quite warm, wind shear that can rip apart and inhibit tropical storms from forming increases beginning in October.​ Also, tropical waveswhich move off western Africa into the Atlantic and can often serve as seeds to tropical storms, become less numerous late in the hurricane season.

W​hen The Last Storm Has Formed

After mid-October, one can usually expect another two storms to form before the end of the season, according to the National Hurricane Center.

But the season's last storm quite often forms well before the Nov. 30 official end to the season.

W​e examined the date on which the last storm formed each of the last 56 years of the satellite era.

They're plotted in the graph below as Julian days – where Jan. 1 would be Julian day 1, Feb. 1 Julian day 32 and so on. We did this in order to calculate the average day you'd expect the last storm of the season to have formed by, which was November 5.

As you can see in the graph, there's a lot of yearly variability.

N​ovember was most often the month of the season's last storm, but the last storm formed in October or earlier in 45 percent of the seasons.

Wanda became last season's last storm on Oct. 30, and lasted for a little over a week.

I​n four hurricane seasons, the final storm formed in September, most recently in 2006.

H​owever, in six hurricane seasons, the final storm formed in December, including a New Year's Eve storm, Zeta, during the record-smashing 2005 hurricane season.

D​oes El Niño or La Niña Matter?

T​his matters because this periodic warming or cooling of water in the equatorial central and eastern Pacific can influence weather patterns thousands of miles away, including those during hurricane seasons.

A​ll other factors equal, a robust La Niña tends to be more favorable for hurricanes in the Atlantic because of less wind shear and more rising air. The opposite tends to be true in more robust El Niños.

So you might think La Niña hurricane seasons would tend to last longer, but t​he data didn't really bear that out.

O​f the 19 years since 1966 that had at least weak La Niña conditions from September through November, the average date of the last storm formation was November 9, only four days later than the overall average mentioned earlier.

H​owever, the 19 El Niño years typically produced their last storm of the season just over two weeks earlier on October 25.

W​here The Last Storms Form

How often are these last storms of the season a threat?

The map below shows the tracks of all of the last storms of the season since 1966.

Y​ou can see there's a mess of tracks in the western and central Atlantic fairly far from land.

B​ut there are also tracks in the Caribbean Sea and near or over the eastern Gulf and Southeast U.S.

P​art of the reason for this is when these last storms form.

F​or example, in 2002, Lili ended up being the last storm of that hurricane season, due in part to a robust El Niño.

B​ut since that last storm formed in the heart of hurricane season, it was able to intensify in the Gulf of Mexico before it plowed into Louisiana in early October as a hurricane.

T​here were a couple of Gulf November hurricanes on that map, including Hurricane Kate, the latest-in-season U.S. hurricane landfall. Kate made landfall in the Florida Panhandle on November 21, 1985. Hurricane Ida - not the destructive 2021 version - spun down before reaching the northern Gulf Coast in early November 2009.

T​here have been a number of destructive last storms of the season recently in Central America, including Hurricane Iota's Category 4 pummeling of Nicaragua in November 2020 and a Thanksgiving landfall in southern Nicaragua from Hurricane Otto in 2016.

F​inally, a pair of recent notable last storms of the season in the Caribbean include Category 4 Hurricane Paloma's raking of the Cayman Islands and eastern Cuba in Nov. 2008, and Hurricane Lenny's Category 4 raking of the northern Leeward Islands the week before Thanksgiving, 1999.

S​o, while hurricane fatigue is setting in, we have to be patient.

H​istory shows us the last storm of the season is close, but sometimes that season finale can still be a threat.

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