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Ten-Year Gap in Major Hurricanes Continues

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Danielle
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Could the first tropical storm of the Atlantic hurricane season break the 10-year “hurricane drought” record?
It has been a decade since the last major hurricane, Category 3 or higher, made landfall in the United States. This is the longest period of time for the United States to avoid a major hurricane since reliable records began in 1850. According to a NASA study, a 10-year gap comes along only every 270 years.
It should be noted that hurricanes making landfall as less than Category 3 can still cause extreme damage, with heavy rains and coastal storm surges. Such was the case with Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
The National Hurricane Center calls any Category 3 or more intense hurricane a “major” storm. Timothy Hall, a research scientist who studies hurricanes at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York and colleague Kelly Hereid, who works for ACE Tempest Re, a reinsurance firm based in Connecticut, ran a statistical hurricane model based on a record of Atlantic tropical cyclones from 1950 to 2012 and sea surface temperature data.
The researchers ran 1,000 computer simulations of the period from 1950-2012 – in effect simulating 63,000 separate Atlantic hurricane seasons. They also found that there is approximately a 40 percent chance that a major hurricane will make landfall in the United States every year.
Research: The frequency and duration of U.S. hurricane droughts
Journal: Geophysical Research Letters, May 5, 2015
Link to paper:
For more information:
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Joy Ng
Music credit: Climb the Ladder by Kurt Oldman from the KillerTracks Catalog
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