Hurricane Season Shaped By One Catastrophic Storm

For quite a while this season, I thought I was going to be gleefully writing about a boring hurricane season where fish storm after fish storm went out to sea between Bermuda and the East Coast.

4 major hurricanes. 5 hurricanes. 13 named storms.

But October ended with a bang and the motto that “it only takes one” rang true once again.

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Hurricane Melissa Rakes The Caribbean

I remember our team realising that the season of mostly unimpactful storms was going to produce a monster. Melissa grew rapidly in the Caribbean into a 185 mph hurricane. It was the last, but the most impactful Category 5 hurricane of the season.

We originally had a section called “Category 5 Rainmaker” in our forecast articles due to the forecast feet of rainfall ahead, but as it became an actual Category 5, wind became an extreme hazard on par with water.

Hurricane Melissa blasted across western Jamaica with a forest-ravaging and town-demolishing fury. More importantly, Hurricane Melissa killed more than 90 in Jamaica and Haiti and the billions of dollars in devastation will take years to recover from.

It was the strongest hurricane to ever make landfall in Jamaica – by over 50 mph. The old record was held by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, which, by comparison, made a relatively less impactful landfall with an intensity of 130 mph.

Despite being downgraded from Category 5 after Jamaica, it still roared across eastern Cuba as a Category 3 storm. The Bahamas, Haiti and the Dominican Republic were dumped on by days of relentless heavy rain.

Three Category 5’s Tear Through The Atlantic

Despite a slightly below-average number of tropical storms and many recurving hurricanes this season, the hurricanes that did form were unusually intense. Of the five hurricanes, three of them became Category 5 hurricanes – Erin, Humberto and Melissa.

The season was all about quality over quantity, with some on social media bringing back memories of the historic 2005 Atlantic Hurricane Season.

(MORE: Hurricane Erin’s Recap)

As Erin rode westward just to the northeast of Puerto Rico during mid-August, it hit progressively warmer water and favorable environmental conditions. Erin began a period of explosive rapid intensification from a tropical storm to Category 5 in just under 30 hours, and from a Category 3 to a Category 5 in just under 6 hours. Thereafter, the storm exploded in size and barely shot the gap between the East Coast and Bermuda.

The second Category 5 of the trio – Humberto – rapidly intensified in late September with winds jumping from 65 to 145 mph in 24 hours, then peaking at 160 mph.

Shooting a narrow gap between the Bermuda High and East Coast along with Imelda, Humberto didn’t have a ton of direct impact besides some squally weather in Bermuda.

Several homes in Buxton, North Carolina, plunged into the ocean during rough surf from the combined impacts of Erin, Humberto and Imelda.

(MORE: Humberto and Imelda’s Intertwined History)

Humberto also went on to cause havoc from Ireland to Norway, where it was called Storm Amy. Hundreds of thousands lost power, travel by rail and air was disrupted and several were killed. It was the second ex-hurricane to become a potent storm to strike Europe following Gabrielle.

Humberto cannot be mentioned without a note about Imelda and its major forecast change. More on that next.

One Hurricane Pulls Another Away From A U.S. Landfall

Let’s take a step back because things got wild in late September: What was to become Imelda was forecast to be near Charleston, South Carolina, as a hurricane. Humberto was on its way to become the season’s second Category 5.

Ever heard of one hurricane causing another to miss the U.S.? By the end of the month, Hurricane Humberto pulled Hurricane Imelda away from a U.S. landfall. That’s a new one for me, too.

The forecast cone of uncertainty for Hurricane Imelda took a 90-degree right turn over the course of a couple of days and, thankfully, Erin went out to sea.

I might be watching this loop for years to come:

In fact, there were no U.S. hurricane landfalls throughout the entire season.

The last season without a single mainland U.S. hurricane landfall was 10 years ago, in 2015.

Only one storm made a mainland U.S. landfall, and that was short-lived Tropical Storm Chantal in early July.

And only one short-lived tropical storm even existed in the Gulf – Tropical Storm Barry in June.

Artificial Intelligence’s Win Over Hurricane, Legacy Models

This one is for the nerds amongst us: AI is beginning to win against other computer models and even some human forecasts. Google’s DeepMind AI model did in less than one hurricane season what many other hurricane-specific models often strive for in several seasons: accrue forecaster support (and surprise) for many of this season’s storms.

Thinking back to yesterdecade – in the days of the GFDL and even the still-used HWRF model – these very hurricane-specific models often took years to be competitive in the forecast realm.

DeepMind said no, we’re doing this much faster.

The new model surpassed human forecasters for track forecasts in the Atlantic and Pacific and was competitive for intensity forecasts, according to a deep dive into the season’s modeling by hurricane specialist Michael Lowry.

One other thing that changed this season is that the battle for a crown between the American GFS model and the European ECMWF model was no contest. The GFS became very unreliable this season. It was actually among the worst models, if not the worst model, at every timestep.

Anecdotally, I found myself also leaving it in the dust when choosing what to share with you all.

King Euro has now owned its crown.

This was the tenth year that I have been a part of writing these end-of-hurricane-season recaps. I would have loved to write a boring hurricane season recap. Maybe next year.

Jonathan Belles has been a digital meteorologist for weather.com for 9 years and also assists in the production of videos for The Weather Channel en español. His favorite weather is tropical weather, but also enjoys covering high-impact weather and news stories and winter storms. He's a two-time graduate of Florida State University and a proud graduate of St. Petersburg College.