From the Carolinas to Central America, many are glad to see the end of the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season. It set a number of records, including the most named storms. The 30 hurricanes and tropical storms used all the names on the list maintained by the World Meteorological Organization, and the final nine were named for letters of the Greek alphabet.
The last hurricane of the season, Iota, was the latest in the year that any storm has reached Category 5 status. It slammed into Nicaragua and Honduras in mid-November, killing dozens of people. That was just 15 miles from where Eta, another major hurricane, hit two weeks earlier. Eta later went on to make not one, but two landfalls in Florida.
This season also set a record for the most U.S. continental landfalls by a named storm: 12. Given the number of storms, the United States got off relatively lightly. Phil Klotzbach, a research scientist at Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science, says, “We did not have any of these hurricanes make landfall in any major metropolitan areas.”
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