Hurricane forecasters are bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. The Atlantic hurricane season was supposed to be epic. Instead, it’s turned into a real dud.

Huge storms wreaking havoc on coastlines from Aruba to Long Island were supposed to line up in the Eastern Atlantic in June and hit us one at a time until late September. The damage was going to be historic and the TV coverage was going to give climate change fanatics plenty of air time to vent that “this is just a foretaste” of what’s to come.

But something puzzling occurred on the way to hurricane Armageddon: not much has happened. The Atlantic Ocean has seen five named storms: two tropical storms, two hurricanes and one major hurricane this season.

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“We definitely got started with an extremely active season,” says Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami.

Indeed, Beryl achieved Category 5 status earlier than any other hurricane in history. The July storm had meteorologists and forecasters scrambling for superlatives. […]