The hurricane seasons of the Atlantic, as well as the eastern and central Pacific, came to an end on November 30. As per reports by NOAA, all of these seasons were above normal this year.
As far as the Atlantic is concerned, since the year 2012, this was the most active. In the year 2016, 15 storms which were named brewed in the Atlantic which included at least seven hurricanes. Not only this, out of these seven hurricanes, three of them namely Nicole, Gaston and Matthew were quite devastating.
Coming to the United States, five named storms made a landfall which happens to be the most since the year 2008 when six storms had hit the US. In Florida, Hurricane Hermine hit Florida and it happened to be the first since Wilma since the year 2005.
Matthew, which was the strongest hurricane of the season, had the longest life of all. So much so that the hurricane was a major one for at least eight days. Not only this, since Hurricane Felix which had affected the states in 2007, Matthew was the only storm to have reached the strength of a Cat 5 hurricane.
As per NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, the higher number of landfalls of storms in the United States is due to the weak vertical wind shear which occurred due to a ridge of high pressure over the western parts of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.
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