What’s causing storms to curve away from the East Coast this hurricane season?

The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season has been unusually peaceful for the United States East Coast. Why haven’t storms headed for the South Carolina coast made landfall?

Several major storms this Hurricane season, like Hurricane Erin and Tropical Storm Imelda, have moved northwest across the Atlantic Ocean towards the Southeast Coast, but ultimately curved away northeast back into the Atlantic.

According to National Weather Service meteorologist Bob Bright, two unusual jet stream pressure areas have helped funnel storms off the East Coast this hurricane season, preventing storm devastation.

The first is a semi-permanent area of high pressure, or ridge, in the North Atlantic Ocean off the United States East Coast. The ridge migrates seasonally and is known as the Azores High when it’s further east near the Azores and the Bermuda High when it’s further west near Bermuda.

Typically, the ridge is closer to Bermuda in the summer and fall, but this hurricane season, it’s been further east than normal.

“It’s usually centered somewhere around Bermuda, and then the winds rotate clockwise around high pressure, so that would put southerly winds across the southeast us and that kind of pattern would help steer storms more towards the United States,” Bright said, “but in this case, that high pressure was more off to the east.”

With an Azores High in the Atlantic, storms are pulled clockwise around the ridge further east in the ocean, curving northeast before reaching the East Coast.

But the ridge isn’t the only factor easing impacts to the East Coast this hurricane season. A trough, a jet stream stretch of relatively low atmospheric pressure, has also protected the coast.

This fall, an unusually prominent trough developed further east than usual over the eastern United States, according to Bright.

“There’s been more of a trough over the eastern United States, and that’s essentially causing the storms to kind of steer off and stay offshore,” said Bright. “Essentially, it was like a wall where the storms wouldn’t make it this far west.”

Together, the ridge helped turn the storms northeast sooner, and the trough helped push storms away from the coast, funneling some of this season’s more major storm systems between the two pressure areas and away from the East Coast.

The Atlantic hurricane season technically lasts through the end of November, so South Carolina could still see a tropical storm or hurricane make landfall this year. However, September is the most frequent month for storms in the Palmetto State.

“Typically, as far as hurricanes go, once we get past mid-October, they’re very rare around here, so we’re pretty much already essentially over with our hurricanes,” Bright said. “Technically, you can’t rule a storm out, maybe in the next couple of weeks, but typically, it’s pretty much done in October, especially by mid-October.”