Hawaii sees ‘pretty quiet’ 2025 hurricane season

NOAA

A color-enhanced satellite image shows Hurricane Kiko in the Central Pacificon Sept. 7. Hurricane Kiko was one of four named Central Pacific tropical cyclones during the 2025 hurricane season.

Hawaii was spared from any significant impact from the four tropical cyclones in the Central Pacific basin during this year’s “pretty quiet” hurricane season.

The total this season, from June 1 to Nov. 30, coincides with the forecast in May of one to four tropical cyclones across the Central Pacific. A near-normal season has four or five tropical cyclones. Tropical cyclones include tropical depressions, tropical storms and hurricanes, the latter two categories being named storms.

Chris Brenchley, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu, told the Hawaii Tribune-Herald on Friday that the four named storms constitute “normal levels of cyclone activity in the Central Pacific.”

The four this season were Hurricane Iona, Tropical Storm Keli, Tropical Storm Henriette and Hurricane Kiko.

None of those storms made landfall in the islands, causing Brenchley to describe 2025’s hurricane season in Hawaii as “pretty quiet.”

Iona and Keli passed to the south of the islands in July, Henriette to the northeast in August, and Kiko to the northeast in September.

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“In Hawaii, luckily, we had no direct impact from those, so that resulted in a light season from an impact-to-land standpoint,” Brenchley said.

Tropical cyclones usually start in the Eastern Pacific and travel west, crossing the 140-degree-longitude line into the Central Pacific.

“They often go northward into cooler waters, where they weaken and sometimes dissipate,” Brenchley said.

According to Brenchley, the last two times there were no tropical cyclones in the Central Pacific during hurricane season was in 1977 and 1979.

“But since then, we’ve always had at least one,” he said. “In 2022, we had one, in 2021, we had one, as well.”

In 2024, there were only two, but one was Hurricane Hone, which sent tropical- storm-force winds from the south into Kau, causing flash flooding that sent mud into homes, closed roads and caused almost $2 million in damage.

Kevin Kodama, a retired senior service hydrologist for the National Weather Service in Honolulu, now operates a Hawaii weather blog called Mauka Showers. He said that Henriette, while passing to the northeast, likely created a different set of consequences.

“Its main effect on the island chain may have been to worsen the drought over the state as it cut off the trade winds,” Kodama wrote. “Hilo airport had its lowest August rainfall on record, and the period from August 9th through the 11th only had 0.01 inches.”

The average hurricane season in Hawaii is four to five tropical cyclones, “though the number can vary considerably from year to year,” Kodama said. He noted there were 16 tropical cyclones in 2015, a record year for the Central Pacific basin, 12 in 1992, 11 in 1994 and 10 in 1982.

Both Brenchley and Kodama pointed to Kiko as another that had some effect on the weather and seas.

“There wasn’t a lot of threat, especially on the Big Island,” Brenchley said. “We had a little bit of threat from Kiko further up the island chain, but it was on a weakening trend, so there wasn’t a ton of uncertainty and possibility of it having a big impact on us. I live on the windward side on the north of the island of Oahu, and we had some pretty good surf from Kiko.

“Even though Kiko was weak by the time it got here, it was previously a major hurricane, so it had built up a significant swell. We had huge waves coming up on the east-facing shores.”

Kodama said Kiko generated “warning-level surf that affected the east-facing shores of the state.”

“It was also enough of a threat that (National Hurricane Center in Miami) called out the ‘Hurricane Hunters’ from the (Air Force’s) 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron,” Kodama wrote. “Kiko ultimately remained northeast of the state, but its center got within 150 miles of the island chain.

“It was close enough for the western half of Kiko’s circulation to produce a slight boost in rainfall to portions of windward Kauai and Oahu.”

Brenchley said El Nino years, which have hotter surface water temperatures in the Pacific near the equator, tend to spawn more tropical cyclones than normal, while fewer are created in La Nina years, where the Pacific equatorial waters are cooler.

“The correlation in past years has been pretty good,” Brenchley said.

“This year, we had an indication there was going to be a weak La Nina — and it still turned out to be a normal level of tropical cyclone activity,” he continued. “So it doesn’t always completely correlate, but it is what the climate prediction folks have latched onto. … And when we get neutral, which is in between, it’s normal.”

While the summer months were marked by drought for most of the Big Island, climatologists declared a weak La Nina on Oct. 10, late in the hurricane season and, at least in East Hawaii, rainfall has increased since, although monthly totals remained below average for most of the island in November.

See more:Hurricane SeasonWeather

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