Hurricane Season’s Sleepy September, An Oddity

If you’ve felt like hurricane season has been a little quiet this month, it’s not just you. After 20 days of quiet since Tropical Storm Fernand dissipated on Aug. 28, Gabrielle became the seventh Atlantic storm on Sept. 17.

Gabrielle is the first storm of September, which is unusual considering this month is typically the peak of hurricane season.

On average, we see three to four named storms and two to three hurricanes in the month of September, with recent years seeing even more. In 2024, September brought us six named storms and four hurricanes — two of which reached major hurricane strength.

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This year's pace is significantly slower than the average pace for September. As the seventh named storm, Gabrielle comes two weeks later than the 1991-2020 average formation date of Sept. 3.

We're behind not just in named storms but in hurricanes, too. The average date of formation for the season's second hurricane is Aug. 26, and we typically see four hurricanes by this point in the season.

With less than two weeks left in September and only one named storm thus far, we are tracking well behind the average pace. If no more named storms appear this month, we will tie a record of just one September storm — the fewest recorded in the satellite era — set in 1997, 1976, and 1972.

However, NOAA still forecasts an above-average hurricane season this year, with 13 to 18 named storms, five to nine hurricanes and two to five major hurricanes expected. That means that although this typical peak month has been quiet, we still have a long way to go for the second half of the season.

Miriam Guthrie graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology with an undergraduate degree in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and is now a meteorology intern with weather.com while working toward her master’s.