Hurricane season

The National Hurricane Center gives the official Atlantic season as June 1 to November 30 and notes that tropical cyclone activity sometimes occurs before and after those dates. Between the bookends, NHC puts the peak at September 10, with most activity falling between mid-August and mid-October.

September 10 comes from NHC's climatology, built on Atlantic activity from 1944 to 2020 normalized to 100 years, so it marks where past activity clusters, not a date on which a storm is expected. The storm calendar on the seasons hub sets these dates beside the Naples rainfall normals.

Based on the 1991 to 2020 climate period, NHC puts an average Atlantic hurricane season at 14 named storms, 7 hurricanes and 3 major hurricanes. NHC's Atlantic basin takes in the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf.

Those counts are an average for the entire basin. They say nothing about how many storms will reach Southwest Florida in a given year, and they are neither a forecast nor a landfall count. Whether the season's approach is a reason to clean a roof is a separate question, answered at a roof cleaned before hurricane season.

UF/IFAS Extension Sarasota County, writing on October 15, 2024, one week after Hurricane Milton, recorded that its outreach garden appeared barren and brown from sodium chloride the hurricane's desiccating winds carried inland, and wrote that the combination of wind burn and sea spray damage left Southwest Florida's landscapes reeling. It is a record about plants, the office's own garden and the region's landscapes, not a Naples measurement or a finding about building surfaces.

What storm stains on a home's exterior are, and what published documents say about removing them, is the subject of whether exterior cleaning removes storm debris stains. A roof after a storm has passed is taken up at a roof cleaned after a hurricane.