# Ten-Year Gap in Major Hurricanes Continues KEvxPnXvEKE

Could the first tropical storm of the Atlantic hurricane season break the 10-year “hurricane drought” record?

It has been a decade since the last major hurricane, Category 3 or higher, made landfall in the United States. This is the longest period of time for the United States to avoid a major hurricane since reliable records began in 1850. According to a NASA study, a 10-year gap comes along only every 270 years.

It should be noted that hurricanes making landfall as less than Category 3 can still cause extreme damage, with heavy rains and coastal storm surges. Such was the case with Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

The National Hurricane Center calls any Category 3 or more intense hurricane a “major” storm. Timothy Hall, a research scientist who studies hurricanes at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York and colleague Kelly Hereid, who works for ACE Tempest Re, a reinsurance firm based in Connecticut, ran a statistical hurricane model based on a record of Atlantic tropical cyclones from 1950 to 2012 and sea surface temperature data.

The researchers ran 1,000 computer simulations of the period from 1950-2012 – in effect simulating 63,000 separate Atlantic hurricane seasons. They also found that there is approximately a 40 percent chance that a major hurricane will make landfall in the United States every year.

Research: The frequency and duration of U.S. hurricane droughts Journal: Geophysical Research Letters, May 5, 2015 Link to paper:…

- Kind: Short
- Year: 2016
- Runtime: 1 min
- By: NASA Goddard
- Genres: Space
- Archive: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ten-Year_Gap_in_Major_Hurricanes_Continues_KEvxPnXvEKE.webm)
- Licence or status: Public domain (as the archive states it)
- Credit: NASA Goddard
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/commons/96289349?play=1)