This unparalleled hurricane season should come to a quiet end with less tropical activity in October, according to a noted hurricane researcher.

Bill Gray of Colorado State University said conditions in the Atlantic and Caribbean are less favorable for hurricane formation in the next few weeks.

The hurricane season ends Nov. 30.

Gray’s team projects three more hurricanes will form this year, but none are expected to reach major hurricane status.

That would be a welcome, slow finish to a season with record numbers of hurricanes making landfall in Florida and affecting South Carolina.

The centers of three hurricanes and one tropical storm have made landfall in Florida, and though Hurricane Ivan’s eye officially made landfall in Alabama, the worst of its winds hit Florida.

Hurricane Charley and Tropical Storm Gaston made landfall in South Carolina, and Bonnie, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne passed over the state or close enough to cause flooding and tornadoes. That’s the most active season on record in South Carolina, topping the record of four storms affecting the state in 1893, according to the state climate office.

“It is not the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic basin that has been so unusual,” said Gray, a professor in meteorology at Colorado State, “but the rare combination of high hurricane activity and very favorable surrounding hurricane-steering conditions that drove so many storms from the deep tropics across Florida in such a short time period.

“This year has been a once-in-a-lifetime kind of year.”

Warm sea surface temperatures and just the right combination of winds have created slightly more hurricanes than normal.

In the past few years, wind patterns over North America created a trough off the Atlantic coast in the summer that in a sense deflected hurricanes, Gray said. This year, the trough set up over land, allowing the storms to keep flowing into the coast.

Only three of 32 major hurricanes in the Atlantic hit the United States from 1995-2003. This year, three of six major storms hit the United States.

Gray had been warning for years that the U.S. coast was due to be hit, but he was amazed “the law of averages would try to catch up to its deficit so rapidly in one year.

“We have studied more than 100 years of storm data, and this year did not behave like any other year we studied.”

Reach Holleman at (803) 771-8366 or jholleman@thestate.com.