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Hurricane Season Doesn't Always Wait Until June To Begin

If you think May is too early for the tropics to get going, you would have been wrong in 8 of the last 10 years.

21 Hurricane Names, One Newcomer This Season

The Atlantic hurricane season officially kicks off in June, but it has jumped the gun with at least one storm in most years since the mid-2010s.

The recent "preseason" stretch: From 2015 through 2024, only two seasons did not see at least one named storm form in the Atlantic Basin prior to June. You can see their tracks plotted on the map below.

Tracks of the storms that have formed before June 1 in the 2015 through 2023 hurricane seasons. The white and black segments of each track indicate when the storm was either a remnant or before it developed into a depression or storm.
(Track data: NOAA/NHC)

Some were impactful: While some of these storms were short-lived and far from land, at least 20 deaths and about $200 million in damage can be attributed to May storms from 2012 through 2020, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

In 2016, Tropical Storm Bonnie soaked the coast of the Carolinas in late May. That was preceded by eastern Atlantic Hurricane Alex, only the second known January Atlantic hurricane. Alex eventually made landfall in the Azores as a tropical storm.

In 2012, Tropical Storm Beryl almost reached hurricane strength before landfall on Memorial Day weekend in northeast Florida.

Visible satellite image of Tropical Storm Beryl nearing landfall in northeast Florida on May 27, 2012.
(NOAA, NASA)

Why it "starts" June 1: Officially, the Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 through Nov. 30. That time frame encompasses over 97% of all Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes, according to NOAA's Hurricane Research Division.

In 1935, the season was set from June 15 through Nov. 15 to match up with a special telegraph line connecting the various centers of the U.S. Weather Bureau, according to NOAA-HRD. In 1964 and 1965, those start and end dates were adjusted to June 1 and Nov. 30. They've been the same ever since.

Named storms and hurricanes per day in the Atlantic Basin.
(NOAA/NHC)

In 2021, the bookends for the season were once again examined, but the team from the National Hurricane Center found moving the start date two weeks earlier would add only 1% of activity.

However, beginning in 2021, the National Hurricane Center moved up the date at which they begin issuing their Atlantic tropical weather outlooks to May 15 to cover these potential preseason storms. These outlooks issued four times each day show areas where tropical development is possible over the next seven days.

Early storm can't predict entire season: We examined all hurricane seasons in the satellite era – from 1966 through 2023 – parsing out whether or not they produced at least one storm before June 1.

As you might expect, the 18 seasons with at least one pre-June 1 named storm ended up with an average of three to four more storms for the season than the 39 seasons without a preseason storm.

However, the number of hurricanes and major hurricanes (Category 3 or stronger) was virtually the same in seasons that started early compared to those that did not. This is because the overwhelming majority of both hurricanes and major hurricanes occur in the peak months of August through October.