5th busiest 6 months since 1930...

Back in mid-summer I posted about the 2010 North Atlantic Hurricane Season and how active it was to that point. The activity continued, and we ended up with 19 named storms, the 2nd most since 1933 (the most was in 2005). The storms were not incredibly intense (although Igor did reach 925 hPa, a strong Category 4 storm), and perhaps even more remarkable, no hurricanes made landfall in the United States, continuing a trend since Ike in 2008 (now over 2 years with no hurricane landfalls). The 2010 season still caused quite a bit of damage in the Caribbean, Mexico, and even Newfoundland!

(picture courtesy of Wikipedia)

It is worth noting that as of today, 01 December 2010, the global total number of tropical cyclones is at a near-record low-- a point all the more interesting because the Atlantic basin is at a near-record high in numbers of TCs. We have seen ~67 (65 if you use only the TCWC numbers) TCs in calendar-year 2010, with only one month to go. This would be the lowest # of TCs in at least 30 years.