ATLANTIC BEACH, Fla. — Hurricane Season officially ends on Nov. 30. This is when the key ingredients in the tropics that produce hurricanes fade away, and we switch to winter weather.
So you may ask how did the 2022 season as a whole stack up?
Back in May NOAA predicated a slight above average season with 6-10 Hurricanes and 3-6 Major Hurricanes. What we ended up seeing was eight hurricanes and 2 Major hurricanes.
This means we had below average hurricanes but below average major hurricanes in the Atlantic.
Those two Major Hurricanes had Major impacts though with Fiona crashing into Puerto Rico knocking out power for the entire island at one point and causing 16 deaths. The other major hurricane Ian rapidly intensified prior to landfall bringing a devastating storm surge to South West Florida before moving across the state and impacting us here on the First Coast.
The first storm of the season formed with Alex back at the start of June but the season remained rather calm after that with the first Hurricane of the season not arriving until Danielle in September. In fact August was the first season with no storm forming in the month of August since 1997.
The season did pick up in September and ran well into November with Nicole becoming the latest hurricane to make landfall on the Florida East Coast on record.
In short we started off calm and the overall energy from this hurricane season was below average based on ACE. ACE stand for Accumulated Cyclone Energy and is defined as "The ACE index is essentially a wind energy index, defined as the sum of the squares of the estimated 6-hourly maximum sustained wind speed (knots) for all named systems while they are at least tropical storm strength."
Despite the overall energy of the year being below average we did have several powerful storms have left a lasting impact here on the First Coast.
