This was one of eight rare hurricanes in the Atlantic basin
Hurricane Able formed several weeks before the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season
Hurricanes are a constant reminder that nature doesn’t follow our rules.
The Atlantic’s hurricane season runs from June 1 through November 30. But that’s just a suggestion, and storms can and occasionally do form outside of that six-month window.
Able was one of just a handful of storms known to achieve hurricane strength before the official start of hurricane season.
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A disturbance over the western Atlantic Ocean encountered favourable conditions as it churned through the region in the middle of May 1951.
The disturbance organized into a tropical storm, which forecasters dubbed Able. Storms in the early 1950s were named based on the phonetic alphabet of the time. Formal storm names didn’t come into use until 1953.
Able gradually strengthened as it moved southwest toward The Bahamas, taking an unusual track for Atlantic storms.
The storm achieved hurricane strength just before grazing Grand Bahama with gusty winds and heavy rainfall, and its intensity peaked with winds of 150 km/h just off North Carolina’s Outer Banks several days later. A front then swept the storm to its demise over the open ocean.
Very few hurricanes form before June
History (thankfully) doesn’t remember Able for its ferocity or destruction, but rather its unusual nature.
Experts have only noted eight hurricanes in the Atlantic basin between January and May, accounting for just 0.82 per cent of the 968 hurricanes recorded between 1851 and 2025. It’s possible there were more before the first weather satellites in the early 1960s.
The most recent pre-season hurricane was Hurricane Alex in January 2016, a strange system that swept the Azores Islands just two weeks after the world celebrated the new year.
Hurricane Alma struck Cuba and the southeastern U.S. as a weakened storm in May 1970.
Hurricane Alice, which formed at the end of December 1954, hit the island of St. Martin during the opening days of 1955.
The strongest on record was an unnamed hurricane that reached Category 2 intensity before making landfall on Saint Kitts in early March 1908.