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

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