2025 storm season features no U.S. hurricane landfalls
Bottled water, canned goods, flashlights and batteries.
Unless you really wanted to use them this past summer and fall, you should have a solid supply for the 2026 hurricane season.
After hurricanes made landfalls on Florida’s coasts each of the last three years, the Sunshine State got a reprieve from “hunkering down” during the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, which ended Sunday.
Not only was Florida spared, but the entire coastline got the reprieve, as for the first time in 10 years, not a single hurricane made landfall in the United States—Tropical Storm Chantal was the lone landfall, in South Carolina on July 7. Storm experts thank the “Bermuda High” set up farther east in the Atlantic Ocean that steering storms away from Florida and the Eastern Seaboard.
“That was a much-needed break,” said Neil Jacobs, undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. “Still, a tropical storm caused damage and casualties in the Carolinas, distant hurricanes created rough ocean waters that caused property damage along the East Coast, and neighboring countries experienced direct hits from hurricanes.”
As Jacobs alluded to, it was exciting, and in one case destructive, elsewhere. The season produced three Category 5 storms: Erin, Humberto, and Melissa.
Erin tied for the fifth-fastest 24-hour increase in maximum sustained winds on record, from 75 to 160 mph, and the third-fastest 24-hour pressure drop in the Atlantic basin on record, (998to 915 millibars).
Humberto joined with Hurricane Imelda in late September, passing just a couple hundred miles of each other in the western Atlantic to produce a “Fujiwhara effect” where storms orbit around one another; the stronger Humberto pulled Imelda away from the U.S. coastline, likely preventing a direct hit though coastal areas still experienced storm surge.
And, in October, powerful Hurricane Melissa, with a pressure at landfall at an incredible 892 millibars, was the strongest landfalling storm in the Western Hemisphere in over 90 years and carved a path of destruction across western Jamaica and eastern Cuba, areas that are still recovering.
With that said, it was quiet this season here at home. Going into the winter, Central Florida and Osceola County face new threats: fires in during the dry winter months—with little rain recently Osceola’s drought index has reached the 400s— and of tornadoes in February through April.
