Within hours, the Atlantic tropics map is wiped clean. Is that unusual in hurricane season?

Hours after the National Hurricane Center issued its last advisory on what was a post-tropical Karl in Mexico and marked a tropical wave several hundred miles southwest of the Cabo Verde Islands on Saturday morning, the 1 p.m. advisory map is as clean as one could hope for during the hurricane season.

But is that unusual?

Not really, explains Brad Reinhart, a hurricane specialist with the National Hurricane Center.

“As you know, the peak of hurricane season is typically mid-September and now that we’re here in mid-October, historically, this is the time of year when we start to see a pretty sharp decline in the amount of overall tropical storm and hurricane activity. So it’s certainly not unprecedented that there are stretches this time of year where as the tropics wind down there might not be development for several days,” Reinhart said.

This can apply even in the hours between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. when the map of the Atlantic showed two “X” marks representing systems and five hours later the map’s spotless.

Earlier, the tropical wave off the African coast was several hundred miles southwest of the Cabo Verde Islands and producing a broad area of disorganized showers and thunderstorms. But the development chances had fallen to near zero percent chance in both two and five days.

Mark that one gone.

According to the 8 a.m. Saturday advisory, Karl was a post tropical cyclone with winds of 30 mph after making landfall as such on Mexico’s southern coast. Even though diminished, Karl’s remnants could still bring heavy rain, flash flooding and mudslides to Mexico’s Veracruz, Tabasco, Chiapas and Oaxaca through the weekend the center had said.

Karl was the 11th named storm of the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season and if there’s another before hurricane season winds to a close on Nov. 30, it will be named Lisa.

So on Saturday we have a tale of two maps. Most people, assuredly, will favor the 1 p.m. image.

“I wouldn’t necessarily characterize it as unusual because based on climatology this is what we would expect to start seeing —declining tropical activity — as you get later into October and into November,” Reinhart said.

“We might be a little bit biased by the fact that the past couple of years, especially 2020, was very busy throughout and we had a lot of October and then November activity. But yeah, historically, this kind of fits the curve of what we would expect to see in terms of declining activity this time of year.”