In brief
- The strongest hurricanes are likely to grow stronger as a result of climate change.
- So far, there has been no significant increase or decrease in the number of major hurricanes making landfall in the United States.
- However, it’s likely that there has been an increase in the number of major hurricanes in the Atlantic as a whole since 1946.
- Also, the intensity of landfalling continental U.S. hurricanes has increased, so even if the total number of landfalls has not increased, their potential to do damage has.
- When major hurricanes do hit, they will do more damage than they did in the past: They will be stronger, wetter, and bring higher storm tides because of sea level rise.
- Expect to see more periods of major U.S. landfall activity in the future, but also gaps when no major landfalls occur.
When I wrote my first-ever blog post on a named storm in the Atlantic on June 9, 2005 — for Tropical Storm Arlene — little did I expect the season of atmospheric mayhem that awaited.
An incredible 28 named storms, 15 hurricanes, and seven major hurricanes later — including four Cat 5s and four U.S. landfalls by major hurricanes — New Year’s Eve 2005 found me blogging on Tropical Storm Zeta a half hour before midnight. I wondered, not for the first time, if climate change had caused us to cross a threshold into a new realm of permanent atmospheric frenzy, since the 2004 hurricane season had also been bonkers.
I asked myself, “Is this going to happen for every Atlantic hurricane season from now on? If so, I’d better get off the computer and go drink some champagne!” And I did.
Fortunately, the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season was an incredible relief — below average in all metrics, with no landfalling hurricanes anywhere in the Atlantic. And remarkably, for the next 11 years, no major hurricanes hit the U.S. — the longest such gap on record (Fig. 1). Perhaps more unbelievable: No hurricanes of any kind hit Florida from 2006-2015 — a 10-year landfall drought.
U.S. major hurricane landfalls return with a vengeance
But in 2016, Florida received its first hurricane landfall since 2005, when Cat 1 Hurricane Hermine hit the Panhandle. And beginning in 2017, the U.S. has gotten absolutely hammered by hurricanes, many of them major hurricanes, including a record-tying streak of five consecutive years with a major hurricane landfall (2020-2024). And between 2017 and 2024, seven Category 4 and 5 hurricanes hit the continental U.S. — as many Cat 4 and Cat 5 landfalls as had occurred in the prior 56 years (Fig. 2). The only comparable such onslaught in Cat 4 and Cat 5 landfalls occurred in 1945-1950, when five Cat 4s hit South Florida (Fig. 3).
Hurricanes are like bananas
So how to explain these numbers? For sure, natural variability is at work in the areas where hurricanes are striking. Jim Lushine, a former warning coordination meteorologist at the Miami National Weather Service Forecast office, used to say, “Hurricanes are like bananas: They come in bunches.” Steering currents and the atmospheric patterns that control where hurricanes form and where they go often have multi-year phases that favor different coastal areas.
My previous post, The future of Atlantic hurricane tracks, discussed in detail the processes at work. In general, it appears that historically, the Atlantic has flipped between two dominant modes, one favoring hurricane landfalls in the southwestern Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, and another bringing increased landfall activity to the eastern United States. A switch between the two modes can occur randomly or because of large-scale climate shifts in sea surface temperature patterns.
No long-term increase in landfalling U.S. hurricanes or major hurricanes
From a U.S.-centric point of view, landfalling hurricanes that hit the continental U.S. are the main concern. Since 1900, we haven’t seen a significant increase or decrease in the number of such storms.
But the main metric we should be tracking is the number of major (Category 3 and stronger) hurricanes, since they have caused approximately 84% of the damage and 91% of deaths in the U.S. since 1980. Gratifyingly, the number of major U.S. mainland hurricane landfalls since 1900 also shows no trend.
The long-term U.S. hurricane landfall record is often cited as the best database we have to judge long-term hurricane trends. And climate deniers like this record, because it shows no long-term trend. Indeed, the Department of Energy secretary, Chris Wright, former CEO of Liberty Energy, the nation’s second-largest fracking firm, includes the long-term U.S. hurricane landfall record in his 2024 climate denial publication.
The increasing number of major Atlantic hurricanes since 1946: Is it real?
But the long-term major U.S. hurricane landfall record is not the same as overall activity in the Atlantic. And it may not be an adequate measure of risk, given the propensity of hurricanes to behave like bananas. Hurricane steering currents change with time, and if there are more major hurricanes prowling the waters of the Atlantic because of climate change, it might be only a matter of time before a shift in steering currents brings those storms to the shores of the U.S.
Indeed, if we plot the number of major hurricanes in the Atlantic since 1946 (Fig. 4), there has been an increase. However, some major hurricanes could have been missed before satellite data became available in the early 1970s.
A 2021 paper, “Changes in Atlantic major hurricane frequency since the late-19th century,” attempted to correct for potential missing hurricanes in the historical record using land and ship observations, which have high-quality data back to 1851.
The authors theorized that no major hurricanes were missed after 1971, but for the period 1900-1956, an undercount of one major hurricane per year was likely. With that correction, the database shows no detectable trends in hurricanes or major hurricanes through the entire record from 1851 until 2019.
Was the method the scientists used to correct for missing Atlantic hurricanes valid?
To test this question, scientist Kerry Emmanuel tried a different technique. He modeled how the atmospheric and oceanic conditions favorable for creating hurricanes have changed over time. His research found “unequivocal increases in Atlantic tropical cyclone activity” since 1900, including in the number of major hurricanes.
His approach found that the historical record before 1900 likely missed some events and that even though the number of major hurricanes in the Atlantic increased, there had been little change in continental U.S. landfalls since 1900.
Yet another way to look at the historical record
Because the long-term record of Atlantic hurricanes might have missed storms before 1972, perhaps a better measure of the prevalence of major hurricanes in the Atlantic since 1946, though, might be to look at landfalls not just in the U.S., but anywhere outside of the continental U.S. — including Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean islands. These regions have been heavily populated since the 1800s, and their landfalling hurricane record is also likely very good.
When we look at that record, we see that there has been an increasing trend in landfalls since the mid-1940s outside of the continental U.S. (Fig. 5). (Note that data is available only since 1946 for non-U.S. landfalls, and there is a gap from 1971 to 1982 that must be filled in from other data sources.)
As we discussed in our previous post, a 2025 paper, “The southward shift of hurricane genesis over the northern Atlantic Ocean,” found that the location where hurricanes form showed a significant shift southward by 346 miles (557 km) from 1979 to 2022 — a shift attributable to climate change. That southward shift may help explain why the mainland U.S. has not seen an increasing trend in major hurricane landfalls in recent decades, while non-mainland U.S. areas, primarily in the Caribbean, have.
Bottom line: I view it as likely that there has been a real increase in major Atlantic hurricanes since 1946. If so, and if steering currents have been friendly to the U.S. in recent decades, we are at increased risk of major hurricane landfalls if those steering currents become unfavorable.
Decreased air pollution blamed for increased Atlantic hurricane activity
The main metrics for studying Atlantic hurricane activity – number of named storms, hurricanes, major hurricanes, and accumulated cyclone energy – have seen an increase since 1972, when high-quality satellite data became available.
Hurricane scientists frequently cite a reduction of air pollution for this increase, though they also point to ocean warming from heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Since the U.S. Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, fine particulate air pollution downwind over the North Atlantic from fossil fuel combustion, mostly sulfate aerosols, has decreased precipitously (Fig. 6). As a result, more sunlight has been reaching the surface, contributing to ocean warming. Warmer oceans are beneficial for hurricane formation.
In a 2019 review paper by 11 hurricane scientists, “Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change Assessment: Part I. Detection and Attribution,” at least 10 papers linking a decrease in sulfate aerosol pollution to increased Atlantic hurricane activity were cited. Four of those 11 authors of the review paper gave low-to-medium or medium-to-high confidence to the theory that decreased fine particle pollution has caused a “highly unusual” increase in Atlantic tropical cyclone frequency since the 1970s. The other seven authors gave low confidence to this hypothesis.
In a more recent 2020 study on the subject, “Detected climatic change in global distribution of tropical cyclones,” Hiroyuki Murakami and coauthors used a specialized global model with a 50-km grid to study causes of the long-term changes in the number of Atlantic named storms. Their model showed that the reduction in sulfate aerosol pollution was a primary reason for the observed increase in named Atlantic storms since 1980.
The intensity of landfalling continental U.S. hurricanes has increased
Unfortunately, the intensity of landfalling continental U.S. hurricanes has increased, so even if the total number of landfalls has not increased, their potential to do damage has. This can be quantified using the power dissipation index: the sum over each year of the cube of the maximum wind speed in each storm at the time of landfall. This is a measure of the total dissipation of kinetic energy at landfall, not accounting for the effect of storm diameter. Power dissipation is also a loose measure of the destructive potential of windstorms. According to a 2021 paper, “Atlantic tropical cyclones downscaled from climate reanalyses show increasing activity over past 150 years,” “these increases are also highly statistically significant over just the 20th and 21st centuries, signifying increasing destructive potential” (Fig. 7).
Conclusion: expect more major landfalling U.S. hurricanes
One of the more confident predictions on how climate change will affect hurricanes is that the strongest hurricanes will get stronger. For example, a 2024 paper, Human-caused ocean warming has intensified recent hurricanes, found that between 2019 and 2023, the maximum sustained winds of Atlantic hurricanes were 19 mph (31 km/h) faster, on average, than they would have been in a world without climate change. With more major hurricanes likely to be prowling the Atlantic in the future — and the potential for steering currents to shift and bring more landfalls — don’t expect the decades-long zero trend in U.S. major hurricane landfalls to continue indefinitely. I expect more periods of high major hurricane landfall activity like that observed in 2017-2024 in our future. And when major hurricanes do hit, they will do more damage: They will be stronger, wetter, and bring higher storm tides because of sea level rise.
However, I don’t think climate change has caused us to cross a threshold into a new realm of permanent atmospheric frenzy, as I worried in 2005. Multiyear landfall droughts like those observed in 2006-2016 are also in our future — though I doubt we’ll see one 11 years long again. Hopefully, 2025-2026 will be the beginning of a multi-year landfalling hurricane drought: El Niño conditions are looking increasingly likely during the 2026 hurricane season, boosting the odds of a quiet hurricane season.
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Bob Henson contributed to this post.
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