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2017 hurricane season ends with a number of records

Posted at 11:31 AM, Nov 22, 2017
and last updated 2017-11-22 11:41:01-05

Hurricane season officially ends at the end of November, and with nothing currently brewing in the Atlantic, it appears there won't be another tropical storm or hurricane in what’s been a very active 2017.

This year's hurricane season was the most active since 2012, and it broke and/or tied a number of records.

The season got off to an early start when Tropical Storm Arlene formed in April — the first time that's happened since 2003. The hurricane season doesn't officially begin until June.

The First Tropical Storms

The first tropical system to make landfall this year would form shortly after the hurricane season officially began. Tropical Storm Cindy formed in late June and hit southwest Louisiana a few days later.

Tropical Storm Emily crossed the Florida Peninsula about a month later, but this storm would turn out to be a mere warm-up for a bigger storm later in the season.

Hurricane after hurricane after hurricane

Roughly two weeks after Emily, the beginnings of Hurricane Harvey formed in the middle of the Atlantic, and it would spend the next week churning through the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico as it got closer to the Texas coast, all while gaining strength.

Harvey eventually hit Texas on August 25 as the first Category 4 storm to make a United States landfall since Charley in 2004 and the first major hurricane since Wilma in 2005.

RELATED: Storm Shield app provides life-saving weather alerts

Once the storm made landfall, it nearly stalled, dropping at least 30 inches of rain in and around Houston with a maximum rainfall total of 64.58 inches in Nederland, Texas, about 90 miles east of Houston.

This statistic gave Harvey the record for the most rainfall ever produced by a single tropical system in the United States.

Hurricane Harvey was the third hurricane of the season and the first of three Category 4 hurricanes to make landfall in the United States — the first time that many large storms would hit the United States in a single year.

Less than a week later, Hurricane Irma formed less than a week later and would eventually kill more than 100 and cause billions of dollars of damages across the Caribbean before making a brief landfall in Florida.

WATCH: Hurricane Irma coverage as a reporter on the ground

Just as Irma fizzled, Hurricane Maria formed and went on to hit the Caribbean again.

And months later, many islands, including Puerto Rico, are still cleaning up, trying to restore power and getting life back to normal.

The season winds down

Hurricane Nate and Hurricane Ophelia both formed in October as the ninth and 10th hurricanes in a row.

This marked the fourth time in recorded history 10 hurricanes formed in a row — 1878, 1886, 1893 and 2017.

Hurricane Nate was the only one of these late season storms to make landfall.

Before it hit the Gulf Coast, it moved through the Gulf of Mexico at 28 miles per hour, faster than any other tropical storm or hurricane in the Gulf.

After these two final hurricanes, only two more tropical storms would form — Philippe, which limped across Florida as a weak tropical storm, and Rina, which spun out in the middle of the Atlantic.

The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season didn't have the most hurricanes, and it wasn't the deadliest. But this season was the costliest on record, causing at least $316 billion dollars in damages so far.

The season officially ends November 30, but the United States, as well as many other Caribbean island nations, will be cleaning up and feeling the season's effects well into 2018.

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