19-04-2025
Map of hurricane landfalls shows how storms tend to avoid Delaware. Why is that?
There have been 307 hurricanes that made landfall in the mainland United States since records began in 1851, but none have had a direct first landfall on Delaware.
University of Oklahoma student Michael Ferragamo's project to map out all of the landfalls shows most of them predictably along the Gulf Coast and southeastern U.S.. However, there is a gap around Delmarva and the surrounding region.
The map marks first landfalls, and just because direct landfall isn't made by a hurricane, or even a tropical storm, doesn't mean there can't be damage. Tropical Storm Isaias produced the longest-tracking tornado in Delaware history, a 29-mile trail for an EF1 twister, as it flew up the Atlantic coast.
Delaware and the rest of the Delmarva Peninsula face directly east. The south-facing shores and barrier islands of the southeastern U.S. jut out into the ocean, creating more of a target for storms tracking the standard northern direction.
"There are always exceptions. Most of the time we're having storms generally starting to move more north-northwestward, and so by having that the Outer Banks kind of jut out that little bit further from where Delaware is, that means that as we have storms go up that way, they're more likely to make initial landfall in the Outer Banks," National Weather Service meteorologist Sarah Johnson said.
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Hurricane Sandy is the most notable exception to this rule. But it is not on this map because it came ashore as a post-tropical cyclone near Atlantic City. It was driven toward a northwestern track by a high-pressure air mass in the Atlantic. If that air mass set up more south, it could have made landfall in Sussex County, Johnson said.
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The 1933 Chesapeake-Potomac Hurricane (Six 1933 on the U.S. landfall map) is very similar to Hurricane Isabel in 2003, making landfall on the Outer Banks in North Carolina first before racing inland. "The main difference with the 1933 hurricane, however, is that it made landfall on the northern part of the Outer Banks, pretty rare for a hurricane coming from the east."
During landfall, it started to speed up and turn northward, allowing it to carry its hurricane-force winds further inland across Virginia. The storm was extremely rare in nature, and one of the most intense to ever affect the Washington, D.C., area. These fast-moving, Mid-Atlantic hurricanes seem to occur every 40 years or so, with 2003, 1933, 1896, 1893, and 1878 all being examples.
"Every time I plot hurricane landfalls, I always discover little cool things and oddities that I never knew," Ferragamo said. "When doing the US landfall map, it occurred to me just how active the 1880s were. In our database, the 1880s hold the record for the most landfalling US hurricanes in a single decade, at 20.
"In fact, the late 1800s featured some very active seasons like 1886, 1887 and 1893. Taking into consideration our lack of technology and populated coastlines, there's a pretty solid chance that activity was even higher than recorded."
"I've done a lot of work with the hurricane database over the years," he said, "so while plotting these hurricanes, I had a general idea of what to expect. However, the one thing that always surprises me comes from New England."
This region, known for its harsh winters and mild summers, has actually taken brutal hits from major hurricanes in the past. The 1938 New England Hurricane produced the strongest hurricane-related surface wind gust ever recorded in the United States, 186 mph at Blue Hill Observatory in Massachusetts, just a few miles south of Boston.
Ferragamo wasn't done with his hurricane plots with the U.S. map, and he next turned his sights to the entire Atlantic basin, which he completed earlier in April: "It's finally done, I can't believe it. After months, I have finally plotted every single Atlantic hurricane landfall on record. There are approximately 1,167 hurricane landfalls listed. This is so unreal to look at," he posted on X this month.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why Delaware is not a common target for hurricanes
