By Matt Simon
December 1, 2025
Introduction:
Additional Extract:(Grist) Back in April, scientists read the tea leaves — or, more accurately, heaps of data — and predicted an above-average hurricane season over the summer and autumn, with nine or 10 named storms, four of which could grow to major strength. Yet hurricane season ended Sunday without even one of them making landfall in the United States for the first time in a decade. That was extraordinary in a good way, but the season was also extraordinary in many bad ways.
Read more here: https://grist.org/science/hurricane-se ... ot- hit/...as hurricane season unfolded, nature dealt a wild card. High in the atmosphere, air currents blow in something called a jet stream, which has waves in it. The part of the wave that humps up is called a ridge, and it is associated with more benign weather. The part that dips down south is called a trough, which is associated with stormy weather.
In August, September, and October — when hurricane season is really ramping up, because oceans are warming throughout the summer — there was less of a ridge than normal around the southeastern U.S. In fact, it looked more like a trough. That created counterclockwise motion in the winds in the mid-level of the atmosphere, where hurricanes are spinning. This, in turn, acted as a kind of force field that pushed hurricanes away from the mainland and back out to sea. “As they approached the East Coast, we had this anomalous influence this hurricane season, where they were more or less steered to the north by that anomalous trough,” McNoldy said
The island nations of the Caribbean, however, were not so lucky. Hurricane Melissa killed at least 45 people in Jamaica, before marching across Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.
