Today marks the final day of the 2015 hurricane season and while it was another unusually quiet season in the Atlantic, it wasn’t quite overall. Although Maine and all of New England once again escaped a direct hit from a hurricane or tropical storm, our luck will only last so long.

The reality is hurricanes in Maine are quite rare, but less so further south across southern New England.

Cyclone Energy
The word cyclone can be misunderstood. In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy uses the word cyclone to describe a tornado, that’s the funnel like wind storm which occurs in thunderstorms. However, the word measure something called the Accumulated Cyclone Energy or ACE index. This is a way to codify how much energy the tropical storms. In 2015, the total energy from all storms in the northern hemisphere has been above average. I noted this in red.

In contrast, the Atlantic hurricane season has been very quiet, I noted that in green. You can see how the areas are divided and who had a more active year.

Active Pacific
The Pacific Ocean was very active and broke some records as well. We saw some storms reach super typhoon strength (typhoon is just another name for a hurricane, think soda for pop) and other storms impact areas normally not in their path. The two maps below show the track these Pacific storms took this season. You’ll be able to compare this to the same for the Atlantic.

Quiet Atlantic
Nature has a funny way of keeping these in balance. We don’t typically see an active Pacific hurricane season and an active Atlantic one in the same season. This year, several factors contributed to the quite Atlantic season, most notably the beginning stages of El Nino. Typically, El Nino years are not very active in this part of the globe when it comes to hurricanes. The reason is, El Nino helps create a strong upper level wind that tends to blow apart hurricanes.

New England Storms
Hurricanes in New England are actively relatively rare. From 1900 until today, there have only been 9 hurricanes to make landfall in New England, the last being Bob in 1991. Yes, Irene did impact the region in a big way back in 2011, but only at tropical storm strength not that of a hurricane. The image below from Blue Hills Observatory shows the tracks of storms to impact New England.

You’ll notice nearly all the storms make a push towards the east coast and then turn northward towards our area. This curve is the result of the summertime semi-permanent pressure pattern in the Atlantic. It’s been 25 years since we had a hurricane reach the shores of Connecticut, Rhode Island or Massachusetts, statistically; this is a very large gap.

Hurricane Season 2016
While this year’s season is just ending, already there are strong indications of a much more active season next year. There is enormous consensus our El Nino of this fall will become a La Nina of next winter. This dramatic shift in ocean temperatures off the coast of South American will have ramifications during the upcoming summer and into the next hurricane season. While I can’t predict if a storm will reach New England I do feel comfortable saying our threat level will be much higher in the upcoming year than it was this one.

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