East Coast's protection from hurricanes could falter in September Dinah Voyles Pulver and Jennifer Borresen, USA TODAYSeptember 10, 2025 at 12:35 AM 1 Although an early September tropical wave in the Atlantic failed to produce a reason for U.S.
- - East Coast's protection from hurricanes could falter in September
Dinah Voyles Pulver and Jennifer Borresen, USA TODAYSeptember 10, 2025 at 12:35 AM
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Although an early September tropical wave in the Atlantic failed to produce a reason for U.S. residents to rush for grocery store shelves and gas stations, that doesn't mean it's time to breathe a sigh of relief or let your guard down.
The season's typical peak is Sept. 10, and a two-week tropical outlook from the Climate Prediction Center shows elevated chances of tropical cyclone formation. Meteorologists already are eyeing other tropical waves emerging off the west coast of Africa.
"September and October have been overachievers (in the past)," said Brian LaMarre, founder of Inspire Weather, and a retired federal meteorologist. The season is not over until November 30. "Hopefully we don't see any landfalls," he said.
1 / 11Storms of the 2025 hurricane season so farTropical Storm Andrea, the first storm of the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, is seen via satellite on June 24, 2025.Storm tracks
So far this year, the United States has been fortunate to avoid a direct hurricane landfall in a season that was forecast to be busier than normal. That's thanks in part to a set of currents and patterns that stack up in layers of the atmosphere above the Earth's surface like a Club sandwich. These patterns move and change, and could at any time leave portions of the U.S. coastline in the bullseye for potential storms that arrive.
These changing patterns of troughs and ridges help drive daily weather, whether it's massive plumes of wildfire smoke that swirl down into the east from the Northwest and Canada or tropical systems that get pushed notheastward out into the open Atlantic Ocean, LaMarre said.
The powerful forces can make the difference between a hurricane that roars ashore and one that spins relatively harmlessly out to sea. A recent satellite video showing smoke billowing eastward from western wildfires illustrates the kind of activity that has helped push away four of the six tropical storms and hurricanes that formed this year.
Troughs from over Canada can dive down into the United States in the summer, helping generate thunderstorms or bringing wildfires smoke down and over the mid-Atlantic and East Coast, LaMarre said.
In recent weeks, "we've seen hot dry conditions in the northwest, while much of the eastern U.S. has seen cooler, below normal temperatures, said Frank Pereira, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center. At one point during the last week of August, hundreds of weather stations set daily overnight low temperature records.
Meanwhile massive wildfires were burning in the Northwest and Canada, and the pattern in the upper atmosphere was bringing wildfire smoke southeast across the Great Lakes and into portions of the Midwest and Eastern U.S., Pereira said.
#Smoke from #wildfires as far away as British Columbia, Canada, is drifting across parts of the eastern U.S. today. This imagery from @NOAA's #GOESEast 🛰️ shows the wispy grayish-brown smoke in stark contrast with the bright white clouds around it. #GOES19 pic.twitter.com/8b2QGHP62W
— NOAA Satellites (@NOAASatellites) September 5, 2025
More than 100 wildfires have started in Canada since September 1, and dozens of others remain active from earlier in the summer, according to Natural Resources Canada.
Depending on where high-pressure ridges set up over the United States, they can create a dome of heat and dry temperatures and spur a "ring of fire" effect that exacerbates storms and violent weather around its periphery. That happened across the eastern United States in June.
During August and early September the wave-like upper atmospheric pattern was centered with a trough of low pressure over the United States and high-pressure ridging along the East Coast.
Weather patterns steer tropical storms around
For much of the hurricane season so far, these patterns have been akin to an atmospheric bully, pushing back against the western portion of a ridge of high pressure known as the Bermuda High, the meteorologists said. It can wield a powerful influence on landfalling hurricanes, by weakening the ridge and creating a channel for tropical systems to move northward.
The ridge can expand and contract at times in a general area across the Atlantic Ocean stretching from Bermuda to Florida. It can be friend or foe for millions in hurricane prone areas, by allowing hurricanes to curve out to sea or forcing them to a landfall along the coast.
Tropical Storm Chantal did make landfall, causing some major flooding in North Carolina. But Andrea, Dexter, Erin and Fernand remained far out to sea.
Stronger hurricanes often tend to follow the edge of the ridge and move toward the north and east, while weaker storms that don't build the tall cloud towers that drive a hurricane's heat engine are moved along by lower level air flows that can move them farther to the west and toward U.S. landfalls, LaMarre said.
In the Pacific, similar upper-level steering patterns in the atmosphere have influenced the direction of Hurricane Kiko, passing well north of Hawaii. The atmosphere also helped play a role in the rapid demise of Hurricane Lorena off the Mexico coast, sparing that region a direct landfall.
How do hurricanes form? An inside look at the birth and power of ferocious storms
What's happening now in the Atlantic hurricane basin?
Many hurricane scientists are puzzled the season hasn't been busier and they're debating a number of potential reasons for that, but one of those involves two additional troughs in the atmosphere, one over the eastern Atlantic and one over the southwestern Atlantic. Both may have been interfering with the ability of tropical waves to organize a tropical storm, said Andrew Hazelton, an associate scientist at the University of Miami's Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies. For the really technical, they're known as tropical upper troposhperic troughs, or TUTTs for short.
These troughs can bring in shearing winds and pockets of dry air that can prevent tropical storms from organizing, Hazelton told USA TODAY on Sept. 9.
Between the positioning of those throughs, there could be a window for storm development in the Central Atlantic, "but it's a pretty narrow one," Hazelton said in a Sept. 9 post on X. "We may not see any significant tropical development in the Atlantic unless/until there's a notable shift away from this pattern."
Many forecasters had expected a storm to form from a tropical wave across the Atlantic during the first week of September. Early forecasts indicated it might take a path similar to four of the other storms this season, but ultimately it dropped off the forecast outlook map entirely, thanks in part to bouts of dry air and shearing winds.
A two week tropical hazards outlook by the Climate Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts 20% to 60% chances of tropical hazards developing somewhere within the Atlantic Ocean's hurricane basin.
AccuWeather has warned the remnants of that wave are likely to bring heavy rain to the northern Caribbean, regardless of tropical formation. Officials and interests from the northern Windwards and Leewards to Puerto Rico, including cruise, shipping and fishing interests, should monitor the weather through mid-week, private weather company AccuWeather said in a Sept. 8 update, but added that due to an expanse of dry air in the region, the risk of the disturbed area "evolving into a tropical storm seems highly unlikely."
A satellite image of the Atlantic Ocean on September 8, 2025 shows tropical waves and thunderstorms but no organized activity expected to produce a storm over the next seven days.
Dinah Voyles Pulver, a national correspondent for USA TODAY, has written about hurricanes, tornadoes and violent weather for more than 30 years. Reach her at [email protected] or @dinahvp on Bluesky or X or dinahvp.77 on Signal.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Hurricane season peak hits as East Coast's protection could falter
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