Areas along the Gulf coast including Florida and our east coast are twice as likely to get two hurricane landfalls within just 10 days according to a study published in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Florida and Louisiana are most likely to experience “sequential landfall,” where one hurricane moves over land faster than infrastructure damaged in a previous storm can be repaired.
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The researchers estimate this timescale between hurricanes to be 10 days for those states.
Being hit by two storms in quick succession gives communities and infrastructure less time to recover between disasters — a significant problem for a region with a swelling population that has struggled to recover following previous natural disasters.
In 2020, 31 tropical cyclones occurred in the North Atlantic tying- 2005 as the most active since 1979. More than half of those systems approached within 155 miles of the U.S. coast, the highest number since 1979.
Researchers wanted to see if there is a trend so they looked at the past hurricane record from 1979 to 2020, focusing on years in which at least two tropical storms made landfall in the same region within two weeks of each other.
It was compared with a climate model to estimate how the number of back-to-back hurricanes would change in the future.
The results indicate Louisiana and Florida are the most likely places for multiple tropical storms to strike, but the entire coast will see more storms.