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Quieter Pacific hurricane season draws to a close

Atlantic season, by contrast, was busy, with devastating storms like Ian

This image shows Hurricane Darby approaching the islands in mid-July. Darby was the only tropical cyclone to reach the Central Pacific basin this year during a below-normal hurricane season that ended Wednesday. Image courtesy of National Weather Service

With just one tropical cyclone that took a backseat to a historic south swell on the same weekend, the Central Pacific hurricane season came to a close on Wednesday as one of the quieter seasons on record.

Hurricane Darby was the lone tropical cyclone of the season, moving into the Central Pacific basin on July 14 as a Category 2 hurricane and hitting maximum wind speeds of 105 mph before it weakened to a tropical storm on July 15 and dissipated south of Hawaii on July 17, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The storm brought 1 to 3 inches of rain to the east side of Hawaii island and also generated advisory-level surf of 8 to 12 feet for east facing shores on July 16. No significant flooding problems were reported, NOAA said.

Around that same time, a historic south swell that was unrelated to Darby and generated by a winter storm in the southern hemisphere hit the islands. The high surf from the swell that occurred July 13-19 crashed over coastal roadways and flooded beachfront properties, including restaurants in Lahaina that spent the day after cleaning up rubble, a canoe club in Kihei that had to move its canoes out of the reach of crashing waves and a hotel in Kaanapali that had to dig channels to drain seawater back into the ocean.

Darby, meanwhile, brought minimal rainfall to Maui as it dissipated over the weekend.

A surfer pops out of a tube during a long ride at Maalaea’s famed Freight Trains surf break on the morning of July 17, the weekend that a historic south swell hit the islands and overshadowed the impacts of the weakening Tropical Storm Darby passing south of the islands at the time. The Maui News / MATTHEW THAYER photo

Tropical Cyclone Bonnie also landed on weather officials’ radar but dissipated in the East Pacific earlier in the month, with moisture from the storm moving across the state on July 12-13, according to NOAA.

“Several rainfall totals of 1 to 4 inches were observed along the windward slopes of the islands, with an event maximum of over 6 inches occurring over the West Maui Mountains,” NOAA said in a news release Wednesday. “No significant flooding problems were reported.”

Forecasters had predicted that this year’s hurricane season from June 1 to Nov. 30 had a 60 percent chance of turning out to be below normal, with La Nina conditions in the equatorial Pacific that were expected to continue through the summer.

“The ongoing La Nina is likely to cause strong vertical wind shear making it more difficult for hurricanes to develop or move into the Central Pacific Ocean,” NOAA had said in its outlook for this year’s hurricane season.

Four to five tropical cyclones occur during an average year in the Central Pacific. The busiest hurricane season from 1970 to 2022 was in 2015, when 16 tropical cyclones hit the Central Pacific at a time of strong El Nino conditions and warm ocean temperatures that help fuel hurricanes.

During the same time period, the Central Pacific saw eight hurricane seasons with just one tropical cyclone, including 2021 and 2022. In 1977 and 1979, there were none at all.

This year’s Pacific hurricane season was in sharp contrast to the “damaging” 2022 hurricane season in the Atlantic that also ended on Wednesday after producing 14 named storms (winds of 39 mph or greater), according to NOAA.

Three hurricanes made landfall, including Hurricane Ian, which hit Florida as a Category 4, causing billions of dollars in damages and becoming the fifth-strongest hurricane ever to make landfall in the U.S.; Hurricane Nicole, which also made landfall in Florida as a Category 1; and Hurricane Fiona, which hit Puerto Rico as a Category 1.

La Nina conditions have the opposite effect in the Atlantic Ocean — while they cause strong vertical wind shear that cuts off hurricanes in the Central Pacific, they result in low vertical wind shear that allows more hurricanes to develop in the Atlantic, according to the National Weather Service.

NOAA cautioned Hawaii residents not to let their guard down as hurricane season ends and wet season continues with predictions for above-average rainfall. Storms during wet season have at times been as damaging as tropical storms and hurricanes during the summer, including a storm in Haiku in March 2021 that flooded homes and destroyed a bridge and a Kona low storm in December 2021 that swamped South Maui and knocked out water supply in parts of Kula.

* Colleen Uechi can be reached at cuechi@mauinews.com.

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