Hurricanes that didn't happen

Back in April and May 2024, various universities and weather agencies predicted there would be more hurricanes in the Atlantic than usual this year. Warm seas meant conditions were perfect for a particularly active season, they said, with somewhere between 15 and 25 named storms.

Yet by mid-September, the typical peak of the hurricane season, only seven storms have been named. Where are the "missing" hurricanes in the Caribbean? To understand what happened, and why the models seemingly got it so wrong, we can't look at the Atlantic in isolation. The key difference this year was unprecedented rain in an unexpected place: the Sahara desert.

The 2024 hurricane season kicked off with a bang: Hurricane Beryl, which made landfall on the island of Carriacou in Grenada on July 1, was the earliest category 5 storm on record. After Beryl, there was a quiet period: an outbreak of Saharan dust meant that the air over the tropical Atlantic was too dry to sustain the moist clouds needed to develop a hurricane. July is generally a less active part of the season, so this is not too unusual: only one storm was named in July between 2021 and 2023.

Click here to read full article ...