“We are just a couple of weeks away from the official end of the Atlantic hurricane season,” — Nov. 30, to be exact, according to USDA meteorologist Brad Rippey. Usually, those final weeks of the hurricane season are quiet. On occasion, a late November system turns into a tropical storm. It may come as a surprise, considering this Atlantic hurricane season has been quieter than expected.

“As we reach this mid-November point, we have seen, to this day, 13 named tropical cyclones and five hurricanes,” Rippey said. That’s compared to the May National Hurricane Center forecast of 13 to 19 named storms and six to 10 hurricanes, and the August update that slightly lowered projections.

“With the August update, that number was ratcheted down to 13 to 18 named storms and five to nine hurricanes based on that August forecast. At the very low end of that forecast, in a technical sense, they were right, at least with the August update. But both of those numbers on the very lowest end — 13 named storms and five hurricanes.”

What were some of the conditions behind the lower tropical storm count?

“We saw a displaced monsoon across the African continent, and that put those thunderstorm clusters into a more hostile environment for development. Perhaps a bigger factor this year was the fact that we saw very hostile winds across the western Atlantic. We saw a dip in the jet stream that tended to rip any developing cyclones apart.” As a result, “we did not see a single landfalling U.S. hurricane in 2025.”

And in fact, only two tropical storms impacted the mainland United States in 2025.

“Only one of those actually made landfall in the United States. Back in late June, we had Tropical Storm Barry move into the Mexican Gulf Coast. Barry later, in a remnant form, contributed to the deadly flooding in south-central Texas, and that occurred in the early hours of Fourth of July. A little bit later on, we saw Tropical Storm Chantal, and that storm did affect the East Coast of the United States, but it was a relatively innocuous tropical storm and did not cause any significant concerns.”