In 2017 and 2018, Hurricanes Harvey and Florence made landfall on the continental US. Both storms stalled at the time of landfall wreaking havoc through long-duration wind exposure and excessive rainfall. In the following paper, TigerRisk discusses what causes storms to stall and the history of stalling storms. Is this a new phenomenon of hurricane behavior or mere coincidence that this occurred in back-to-back years?

A storm is classified as stalling if its forward speed is 6 mph or less for at least 12 consecutive hours. The following references to “stalling” Atlantic tropical cyclones (TC) use the HURDAT2 data set consisting of temporal, spatial and descriptive information of cyclones from 1851 – 2017 [1].