Hurricane season usually peaks around early September, when the tropical seas are at their warmest. Last season, there were 8 storms that were ongoing in the month of September. That was a particularly active season, but that burst of storms happens when it usually does.

The storms started with Dorian and ended with Lorenzo (Erin came and went before September came around, while we all remember how long lived Dorian was) before all was said and done. Now, keeping in mind that it is only the 11th of July, note that the storm that clipped the mid-Atlantic this weekend was Tropical Storm Fay.

That means it was the 6th storm of the season, which didn’t come, even during last season’s intensity, until September. That’s a pretty remarkable thing. We usually don’t get to our F’s until at least late August, but the NHC has had to be particularly busy this year.

That sounds pretty dramatic, but check out this forecast map for Fay.

It was a shortwaved feature that didn’t last long, and wasn’t well organized until it had aid from the jet stream near the coast. The life span isn’t dissimilar from the rest of the storms of the 2020 season. The strongest storm of the season was Arthur, which had a 60mph max gust at his core.

In short, we have made it to July with 6 named storms, and none of them have become a hurricane. The NHC also does not have any areas being monitored for development into a tropical feature, which seems to suggest we are in the clear for a few days, at least.

Despite the brief areas of organization, this hasn’t been a terribly destructive early storm season. Sure, some of these bubbles have reached the lowest threshold to be named but nothing has approached the more significant threshold to be identified as a hurricane.

There hasn’t been a great deal of excess energy in the north Atlantic this season (in fact a fair bit less recently with that well advertised Sahara dust cloud muddling the skies), but continued improvement in monitoring and identification, as well as a slight aberration towards organization in the grand scheme of things, we have a lot of names already used, and the real meat of the season isn’t even here yet.