Hurricane season is over by December, right? Well, that's not a hard and fast rule, and in 2003, that was broken not once, but twice.
On December 9, 2003, 22 years ago today, theNational Hurricane Center wrote its first advisory on Tropical Storm Peterin the far eastern Atlantic Ocean.
As you can see in the map below, Peter never threatened land as it made a figure eight track over 800 miles west of the Cabo Verde Islands.
Peter was one of 25 storms that have existed in the Atlantic Basin in December in records dating to mid-19th century. The last time it happened was for an early December 2013 storm that wasn't named at the time, but was found in post-analysis by NHC meteorologists.
But what made 2003 quite strange was that Peter was thesecondtropical storm to form that month.
Less than a week earlier, Tropical Storm Odette became the first December tropical storm to form in the Caribbean Sea before its flooding rain and mudslides killed eight in the Dominican Republic.
It was the first time since 1887 that two tropical storms formed in the Atlantic Basin in December. Two years later in 2005, Hurricane Epsilon was a November holdover into December, followed by Tropical Storm Zeta just before New Year's Eve in that historic hurricane season.
Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been covering national and international weather since 1996. Extreme and bizarre weather are his favorite topics. Reach out to him onBluesky,X (formerly Twitter)andFacebook.
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