Hurricane Irma leaves Americans frantically Googling: ‘When is hurricane season over?’

Call it hurricane fatigue.

Hurricane Irma is days from striking the mainland United States, but the Category 5 storm is already the strongest forecasters have ever seen develop in the Atlantic basin, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Meanwhile, Texas has just begun to recover from devastating Hurricane Harvey, which dumped 50 inches of rain on Houston and other parts of the state. And as if that wasn’t enough, two other hurricanes—Jose and Katia—are developing in the Atlantic.

So maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Google searches in the U.S. for “When is hurricane season over?” have surged in recent days, approximately doubling from just a month ago. (For the record, the season isn’t over until November 30—but storms tend to be weaker after October, according to the New York Times.)

People across the U.S. haven’t asked the search engine when the hurricane season is over at such a high rate since Hurricane Matthew struck the U.S. in 2016. And before that, searches for “When is hurricane season over?” peaked around the time of Hurricane Katrina, according to Google trends.

When Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, it left nearly 2,000 dead and permanently altered the city. Right on the heels of Katrina came Hurricane Rita, which was much less deadly but led to huge evacuations in Houston and other areas of southeast Texas.

Why are so many curious about the end of hurricane season right now?

At least in part, it’s an annual tradition: Searches for “When is hurricane season over?” always tick up in the fall as more hurricanes and tropical storms make the news, as Google Trends demonstrates.

Across the 6-month hurricane season—which stretches from the beginning of June to the end of November—the three months of August, September and October see most hurricane activity, according to the Times.

“This is the peak,” Gerry Bell, the lead seasonal hurricane forecaster with the Climate Prediction Center, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told the Times. “This is when 95 percent of hurricanes and major hurricanes form.”

But searches could also be higher than in most years right now because of back-to-back Harvey and Irma—along with the others percolating in the Atlantic.

“The U.S. has never been hit, since we started collecting records in 1851, by two Category 4 or stronger hurricanes in the same season,” meteorologist Jeff Masters, a co-founder of the website Weather Underground, told PBS. “If Irma follows the current National Hurricane Center projection, that will happen.”

This story was originally published September 6, 2017 at 8:44 PM with the headline "Hurricane Irma leaves Americans frantically Googling: ‘When is hurricane season over?’."