As of the day I'm recording this, in mid-October, there have been 15 named storms in the Atlantic Ocean in 2018.

This is the fourth year in a row in which hurricane season started early in the Atlantic.

The traditional date range for this season has been from June 1st until November 30th.

That's just convention, not a set rule, but it's been a stable enough pair of brackets to be used consistently for the past several decades, with few exceptions.

This season has also overshot the somewhat conservative estimate made by scientists at Colorado State University,

which called for 11 named storms this year, though the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

forecast back in May, that the 2018 season had a 75% chance of an above-normal or near-normal

number of such storms.

Normal is becoming a somewhat fraught term in the world of hurricanes and tropical storms,

though, as normal implies that there are predictable norms.

There are historical averages that tell us what we can probably expect when it comes to things like Atlantic basin storms of a certain magnitude.

But for the past decade or so, that seems to be less and less the case. Part of our awareness of these types of

weather patterns, of course, has to do with our ever-present abundance of information, which very

much includes potentially frightening and dangerous storm reporting, saturating our most popular

media sources. But part of why we've heard so much more about these types of

storms of late is that we just keep setting records. Any norms that we once had seem to be shifting,

increasing the potential for new fringe events, outliers that would have been just outside

the range of likelihood or even possibility not too long ago,

but which today have been brought into the range of potential and even certitude.

As I'm recording this, Hurricane Michael has just finished devastating the Florida panhandle

before sweeping its way across six states, killing more than a dozen people, wiping out

entire towns and dislocating tens of thousands of people. At the moment, about half a million

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