2009 Hurricane Season Stats, Scores

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The Atlantic Hurricane Season is officially over. We got 6 Tropical Storms plus 3 Hurricanes under our belt this season, making for 9 Named Storms (plus two Tropical Depressions that did not get named). All told, we were very close to the normal of 9.6 storms. (Could another storm form this year? Technically yes, it happened in December 2007 and January 2006, though there's nothing in the current weather pattern that points to a repeat).

The season began early (TD #1 was May 28th) but didn't spawn any named storms until August 13th, and ended early (with the dissipation of Ida on November 10th), very similar to the 2007 season's span. The strongest storm in 2009 was Hurricane Bill, a Category 4 storm. Only two storms, Ida and Claudette, made landfall in the United States.*

Looking at forecasts made in April 2009, as I blogged then there were 5 contenders. Comparing these forecasts to the actual numbers, none were closer than 2 named storms and all were above actual except for the WRC forecast of 7, which frankly at the time seemed a bizarre outlier. Everyone else overestimated the storms (probably because they underestimated the power of the El Nino which came to be during the Summer).

Mathematically speaking, WRC won the contest with CSU and AccuWeather coming in 2nd and 3rd. As time moved forward, forecasts decreased for those who updated them. For example, here are what CSU's predictions looked like as of their August forecast:

Three forecast sources updated their forecasts after hurricane season began, AccuWeather.com in June, WSI in July and CSU (Colorado State's Dr. Bill Gray) in August, creating a 3-way tie predicting 10 Named Storms -- a number that was still ultimately too high.

Compared to previous years, this was as slow as the 2006 season and below all others since 2005.

*AccuWeather.com originally predicted that 4 named storms (later 3) would affect the U.S. Although only 2 did officially, Joe Bastardi reminds us that several unnamed storms including the September Nor'easter and "Nor'Ida" affected the coasts with tropical-storm force winds. Officially though, we were too high by one storm. ADDITION: Where we really were wrong, as Chris points out below, was with the strength of those storms. We originally forecast that 3 of the 4 storms that would affect the coast would be hurricanes (one major) and that did not pan out. While we think that 2-4 storms did strike, none were of hurricane force.