September 2017 was the single busiest month of the Atlantic hurricane season on record.
To get a sense of the high storm activity in the Atlantic last month, check out this stunning visualization of the previous five weeks of the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season, created by Tyler Stanfield, a meteorology student at the University of Oklahoma, using satellite images from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s two-day graphical tropical weather outlook.
The US has seen 14 named storms in the Atlantic and 17 in the Pacific, pacing very close to 2005’s record year, which had 34 storms total in both basins by this point. The latest Atlantic storm, Tropical Storm Nate, could hit the US this weekend on the gulf coast, possibly with a path into New Orleans.
If Nate reaches land as a hurricane, it would be the first time in nine years that the continental US has been hit by three or more in the same year, according to Philip Klotzbach, a meteorologist at Colorado State University.