Hurricane season winds down, and SC had a lucky year. Here’s what happened.
In the business of hurricanes, it only takes one to make it a bad year.
In 2025, the bad one was most certainly Hurricane Melissa, which tore across Jamaica in late October, devastating the island. But the rest of the season has been equal parts intense and quiet. No hurricane made landfall on the mainland United States, even as a number of major storms tore across the basin.
The Atlantic hurricane season does not officially close until the end of November, but the peak season passed when October ended. Further developments are still possible, but the odds of a new storm coming for South Carolina this year are slim.
An uneventful season in S.C. so far.
South Carolina typically sees one to five storms per year, Cary Mock, professor of geography at the University of South Carolina said.
“[This season] definitely is pretty inactive,” Mock said. “So it’s just one land-falling storm. It happened to be one in South Carolina.”
Tropical Storm Chantal made landfall near Litchfield Beach, S.C. on July 6, bringing some reasonably heavy rainfall to the state’s northern coast. It was the only storm to make landfall on the mainland U.S. this season.
Mock said this season called to mind the hurricane season of 1864, which happened in the midst of the Civil War. While there is no indication of any tropical activity in the Atlantic Hurricane database for that year, Mock and his colleagues used old records to identify one small tropical storm that hit South Carolina that year before moving up to Virginia.
The Atlantic’s quietest year on record was 1914, where only one tropical storm formed, Mock said. Since there were no satellites at the time, researchers used British Navy ship logs from World War I to reconstruct the tropical activity of the period, and the only record they have was of the one tropical storm, which hit Florida.
2025 by the numbers
Despite minimal landfalls on the mainland U.S., 2025 brought no shortage of tropical activity over the ocean.
A dip in the jet stream — strong winds high up in the atmosphere — has helped steer hurricanes away from the East Coast, Mock said. A high pressure system known as the “Bermuda High” was also weaker than normal over parts of the season, helping move some storms away from the mainland U.S., according to reporting from the New York Times.
At the beginning of each hurricane season, the National Weather Service releases its forecast. The agency updated the forecast in August, predicting nine to 14 named storms, five to nine of which would become hurricanes. Two to five of those would become Category 3 or higher.
As of November 6, the outcome is the following, according to NOAA.
- 13 named storms, which is average
- 5 hurricanes, which is one less than the average
- 4 major hurricanes, one more than average.
A measure of duration and strength of cyclone energy, known as Accumulated Cyclone Energy or ACE, is 13% higher than average this season.
Hurricane Erin spun into a massive Category 5 storm in August. But Erin never made landfall, and brought only rough surf and rip currents to Hilton Head’s beaches. Erin was large, and its tropical storm force winds extended upwards of 500 miles from its eye, according to the National Weather Service. The hurricane also underwent a process called rapid intensification, causing the storm to advance from a Category 1 hurricane to a Category 5 within only 24 hours.
Rapid intensification is difficult to forecast, and it’s largely driven by warm ocean temperatures, which are becoming more frequent due to climate change, Mock said.
“The temperatures are not just warm at the surface, but they’re warm pretty deep, and those can support stronger hurricanes, and potentially more rapid intensification,” Mock said.
Later in the season, the state dodged the bullet that was Hurricane Imelda. The storm formed in late September, and was poised to move close along the S.C. coast, until Hurricane Humberto pulled it away from the Carolinas. Because the two hurricanes were so close to each other, Humberto effectively moved Imelda along a different track than initially forecast, a rare phenomenon called the Fujiwhara Effect. Imelda ended up taking a turn northeast, and the East Coast avoided any serious impacts.
What’s next?
Hurricane season officially runs until the end of November, but the odds of another storm coming for the state are increasingly slim. As of Friday morning, there are no systems on the National Hurricane Center’s radar. If a storm does form, Mock said that it will likely affect the Caribbean.
This story was originally published November 9, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
