Hurricanes in November?

Lenny near peak intensity as a Category 4 (Source: NOAA)

November, like June, is often a very quiet month of the hurricane season. However, that’s not to say a memorable storm doesn’t form every few years. The most favored area for a tropical storm or hurricane to form this late in the season is in the Southwestern Caribbean Sea. The two primary factors that help systems to develop are that the water there remains very warm for most of the year and the wind pattern often remains favorable.

During the active 1999 hurricane season, Lenny became one of the strongest November hurricane on record.  In addition, 1999 saw both Hurricanes Dennis and Floyd make landfall along the U.S. East Coast.   Hurricane Lenny was named a tropical storm on November 13 and became a hurricane on November 15, once maximum sustained winds reached 74 mph. Lenny kept intensifying over the warm water of the Caribbean Sea and nearly became a Category 5 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 155 mph – just under the 156 mph threshold.

Aside from being such a strong storm so late in the season, another characteristic that made Lenny very rare is that it tracked east through the Caribbean Sea. The vast majority of storms in the Atlantic Ocean Basin either track west or north, but forming so late in the season, Lenny headed east causing some damage to the Caribbean islands. Lenny was the last named storm of 1999.  By comparison, the 2014 hurricane season has been much quieter with the last named storm, Tropical Storm Hanna, dissipating on October 28^th.