Wind shear, luck largely helped keep hurricanes out of Florida this year
Hurricanes turned out to be a bigger threat to New York City this year than to Miami.
The Florida peninsula escaped any landfalls during the third-busiest season in history, which ended Tuesday after producing eight direct hits on the United States.
None of this year’s 21 tropical storms and hurricanes hit anywhere in Florida except the Panhandle. How did most of Florida dodge a bullet? Or more accurately, 21 bullets?
Experts say it was largely luck and note that a track change of as little as 50 miles could have allowed a pair of storms to strengthen and hit South Florida. But they point to a few meteorological features that ran in Florida’s favor this year.
Looking at a map of the 21 storm tracks, which are bunched either in the Gulf of Mexico or mid-Atlantic Ocean, it almost looks as if the state were protected by a forcefield diverting storms to the east or west. And actually, at least toward the end of the season, there was such a forcefield.
The forcefield was a broad region of wind shear — high-altitude changes in wind direction — that discouraged storms from forming or maintaining their strength. Although it functioned less by diverting storms than by preventing them from forming at all, it protected Florida during the peak of the season.
“The wind shear over Florida and Cuba and the western Caribbean really increased a lot in September and October, and that’s when it really got quiet,” said Matthew Rosencrans, lead seasonal hurricane forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. “When you have more wind shear, you’re less likely to have storms.”
Florida leads the nation in hurricane landfalls, racking up 110 from 1851 to 2004, according to the National Hurricane Center. Texas is a poor second, with 59.
Among Florida’s hurricanes have been some of the most infamous — Hurricane Andrew, the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 that destroyed the Florida Keys railway, and the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928 that drowned more than 2,500 people.
Enduring the largest number of hurricane strikes historically in Florida are the Keys, Miami-Dade County and Broward County. But in 2021, there was not a single storm that would have caused anyone in South Florida to put up their shutters, let alone evacuate.
“Florida in general, considering how busy it’s been in the past few years, has done pretty well,” said Phil Klotzbach, research scientist for Colorado State University’s Tropical Meteorology Project. “Some of it was basically luck.”
This season saw eight landfalls in the United States, including Hurricane Ida, a
Category 4 storm that struck Louisiana and reached the New York metro area, where its rains drowned more than 40 people in vehicles and basement apartments.
One factor in Florida’s favor was the locations where storms formed this year, Klotzbach said. They tended to form close to Africa, from which they veered north into the Atlantic, or they formed in the Gulf of Mexico or Caribbean Sea, pursuing courses more likely to take them to Louisiana, Texas or Mexico than Florida.
“A lot of the storms either formed in the eastern Atlantic or they formed fairly far west, in the Caribbean and some forming in the Gulf,”
Klotzbach said. “Most of the storms that form right off Africa make this right turn and are just fish storms.”
Although meteorological factors clearly played a role in Florida’s experience this year, experts say there was a strong element of chance in the state’s deliverance, since a 50-mile difference in a storm’s path can make the difference between a windy day and a catastrophe.
“It was almost entirely luck,” said Brian McNoldy, Senior Research Associate at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. “You can go years without anything happening and then you’ll have two in one year.”
He pointed to Hurricane Elsa, for example, which crossed Cuba and skimmed the west coast of Florida before making landfall on the Panhandle. Had it turned north a day or so sooner, it could have hit South Florida.
Another possibility had been Tropical Storm Fred, which could have tracked slightly north and hit the tip of the peninsula as a hurricane rather than weakening over the mountains of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
The region within 100 miles of Miami tends to get a hurricane every three years or so on average.
“They don’t come nicely spaced like that, of course,” he said. “We’ve had nine, 10, 11-year gaps between hurricanes in South Florida. It’s somewhat random.”
David Fleshler can be reached at dfleshler@ sunsentinel.com and 954356-4535.
“It was almost entirely luck. You can go years without anything happening and then you’ll have two in one year.”
— Brian McNoldy, senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science