'23 hurricane season made noise, but it was quiet here

Meteorologists are all over the internet, picking over the data from the 2023 hurricane season, which officially ended Thursday, and gauging the impact of an unexpectedly strong El Nino weather pattern.
But the bottom line for south Louisiana is that the 2023 Atlantic Basin hurricane season produced not so much as a close call, the second consecutive quiet year here.
And that’s good enough for St. Mary Parish, which lived through the blacked-out weekend of Hurricane Barry in 2019, more blackouts during the record-breaking 2020 season and the last-minute near miss from Hurricane Ida in 2021.
The quiet time this year came despite the fact that 2023 gave us the most active El Nino-influenced hurricane season on record.
South Pacific weather patterns oscillate between La Nina patterns, which create conditions conducive for hurricane development, and El Nino patterns, which generate shearing winds that tend to limit tropical weather.
In 2023, an El Nino pattern developed quickly after the end of a three-year La Nina.
Even so, respected hurricane predictions by Colorado State and the National Hurricane Center anticipated greater than usual tropical weather activity. And they turned out to be right.
The season saw 20 named storms from Tropical Storm Arlene on June 1 to Hurricane Tammy on Oct. 11.
Only one storm made landfall in the United States. Hurricane Idalia made landfall on the morning of Aug. 30 near Perry in the Big Bend region of Florida.
Idalia showed a characteristic that has become more and more frequent in recent years. It intensified from a Category 2 to a Category 4 storm in less than two days, and packed 130 mph winds when it came ashore.
Idalia is blamed for seven deaths and about $2.4 billion in damage.