BATON ROUGE — Peak hurricane season has come and gone without any named storms impacting the Gulf Coast region. Despite multiple weather centers calling for an active 2025 season, there have been 12 named storms so far this year, none of which have made their way to Louisiana, and the season is about two-thirds of the way done.
“Most of the preseason forecasters were talking about storm numbers in the range of as low, maybe as 14 to 15, upwards close to 20,” said state climatologist Jay Grymes. “Gabrielle made the seventh storm, and we’re more than halfway through the season.”
Since UWK spoke with Grymes, Hurricane Humberto, Tropical Storm Imelda, and Tropical Storm Lorenzo formed in the Atlantic. None of these systems were in, or headed for, the Gulf of Mexico.
“We might get up to a dozen or so, but we’re certainly not going to see anything in the high teens the way things are going now.”
Grymes said what’s even more notable than the small number of named storms is the lack of activity around peak hurricane season. “Everybody’s kind of aware of hurricane season peaks around the 10th of September,” Grymes said. “We went from about the 28th of August up until just a day or two ago without any named storms in the basin, right in the heart of that peak of the season.”
“It’s certainly rare, there’s no question about it,” Grymes said. “To go through the two to three week period in the heart of the season. It’s all but unheard of. Even going back historically, prior to the satellite era, we know that to be this quiet at this time of year is very unusual.”
Along with the low number of named storms is the lack of activity in the Gulf of Mexico this year. “It’s been quiet over the Atlantic basin, and it’s also been unusually quiet in the Gulf of Mexico,” Grymes said. “Only one named storm, that was Tropical Storm Barry back in June, and it went into Mexico.”
“So for the entire U.S. Gulf Coast region, this has been, dare we say it, the kind of season we want, with no named storms.”
There is no single cause for the lack of storms, but experts can draw some conclusions. “A couple of things have been in play. One is that in the heart of the tropical Atlantic, we’ve been seeing a persistence of wind shear that normally would have relaxed substantially by now. Well, it’s still out there,” Grymes explained.
“The other thing we’re also seeing in the tropical Atlantic that tends to, if not go away, has at least abated by now, is the persistence of these large pockets of unusually dry air at the mid and upper levels,” he said.
“Those two also limit the ability for tropical waves to start to get organized. We don’t know why, necessarily that both wind shear and dry air have persisted this deep into the season, but they are at least two of the reasons why the season has been unusually quiet.”
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