It’s been a tough year for hurricanes in the Atlantic as the season officially ends.
In what was originally predicted in May by experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to be a near- or above-normal season, this year’s squad of storms was surprisingly plagued by inconsistency and, ultimately, failed to reach what it believed was its full potential — even in a year that produced three Category 5 storms but somehow zero U.S. landfalls for the first time since 2015.
“We just didn’t get it done. I blame myself,” said Tropical Storm Andrea, the first named storm of 2025. “I was the first to form, and maybe I wasn’t ready. I fell apart in half a day. But the bottom line is, as the lead-off storm, it’s my job to set the tone. And I didn’t do that.”
“With El Niño, the rotation of the earth, and more people than usual peeing in the Atlantic causing warmer waters, we’re fairly confident there probably will be between zero and 100 hurricanes this season,” said Dr. Ida Kneaux, chief administrator of NOAA, back in May.
Coming into the season, expectations were high among experts.
Eric Norman, Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), stated that the preseason outlook called for a 60 percent likelihood of 13 to 19 named storms, of which 6 to 10 could become hurricanes, including 3 to 5 major hurricanes. An average hurricane season produces 14 named storms, of which 7 become hurricanes, including 3 major hurricanes. Though, these predictions are not in line with the ones first released by the organization back in May.
“It’s obviously been hard on the storms this year,” Norman said. “There were some memorable performances from a few storms, sure, but it’s not at all how they wanted the overall season to go. But they’re a group of veteran weather patterns that have been around for over 4 billion years, so this isn’t their first bump in the road. They’ll be back.”
Norman noted that season predictions are not an exact science and are more of an estimate based on how much alcohol their interns can drink.
There were plenty of reasons the hurricanes didn’t get it done this season: lack of timely air currents, over-reliance on warm water, systems that couldn’t duplicate what they had done in previous years, the massive carbon emissions from New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s globe-trotting, and the sudden spike in atmospheric methane from Buc-ee’s travelers that created unexpected pockets of wind shear.
The bottom line, though, is that the season fell well short of the storms’ own expectations — even with above-average accumulated cyclone energy and a record-setting performance from Hurricane Melissa.
“We didn’t put ourselves in a position to be successful. The warm water was there. I guess we just didn’t want it bad enough,” said Category 5 Hurricane Erin, the first major hurricane of this season.
“I thought for the majority of the season we created a number of opportunities for ourselves and we took advantage a few times, but we just didn’t finish. When you look at our overall production — the number of hurricanes, the strength of them — we fell short of our own goals. It’s disappointing.”
The season started sluggishly with storms Andrea and early systems struggling to survive more than a day. But the meat of the lineup gave the squad a spark with systems Erin, Imelda, Humberto, and Melissa collectively producing catastrophic impacts — though mostly outside the United States. Aside from those pulses of life, the remaining storms just couldn’t finish the season strong. Several storms whiffed entirely, causing zero damage and no deaths.
“Look, since 1995, we’ve put some high-quality squads out there. We’ve had above-normal seasons in 12 of the last 22 years, but obviously, this just wasn’t our year,” said Imelda, who came closest to brushing the U.S. coastline but ultimately veered away.
But the standout — and the only one expected to have its name retired — was Hurricane Melissa, which devastated Jamaica, Cuba, and the Bahamas and tied the record for most intense landfall in Atlantic Basin history.
The squad has a lot of work to do this offseason to get back into contention for memorable storms.
“We’d certainly like to start off stronger next year,” said Hurricane Melissa, whose explosive rapid-intensification streak produced maximum sustained winds of 185 mph. “We have a challenging off-season ahead of us, but we’ve got a solid, hungry group here, and I think we’ll learn from what happened this year and do whatever we can to avoid it from happening again. We’ll get these things corrected.”
Looking ahead to the 2026 season, storms that reportedly have an interest in possibly joining the lineup next year to beef up the damage-production include Arthur, Bertha, Cristobal, Dolly, Edouard, Fay, Gonzalo, Hanna, Isaias, Josephine, Kyle, Leah, Marco, Nana, Omar, Paulette, Rene, Sally, Teddy, Vicky, Wilfred, and Jeff Landry.