Hurricane season ends in a week. Researchers say it was a strange one.

Hurricane season ends on Nov. 30. Researchers are taking stock of its surprises: Hurricane Melissa was one of the most powerful storms ever recorded, but a lull came at the season's usual peak.

Three Category 5 storms, one of the most powerful hurricanes ever recorded, zero U.S. landfalls and a mystifying lull at the usual peak of activity: Together, these and other factors made for a “screwball” hurricane season this year.

That’s how atmospheric scientist Phil Klotzbach put it, anyway.

“It was just a strange year,” said Klotzbach, who studies hurricanes at Colorado State University. “Kind of a hard year to characterize.”

Hurricane season comes to its official close on Nov. 30. In some ways, 2025 fits what researchers expect to see more often as the climate warms: Hurricanes continued forming late into the season and several intensified at extreme rates to produce some of the most intense storms in history.

But in other ways, it was simply odd. Fewer hurricanes formed than experts predicted, but almost all of them became major storms. And the continental U.S. was spared a landfall for the first time in a decade. The surprises were a reminder of hurricane season’s unpredictability — particularly in a warming world — even as forecasting gets more accurate.