Hurricane Season Runs Six Months Here, and the Hunters Fly from Biloxi

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from 1 June to 30 November, and on the Mississippi coast the statistical peak falls in September. That is not a reason to avoid the Gulf in summer. It is a reason to book differently.

What this coast watches

Category number describes wind. What does the damage on this shoreline is water. Biloxi sits on a low peninsula between the Mississippi Sound and the Back Bay, and the Sound is a shallow lagoon that piles surge rather than dispersing it. A weaker storm on a worse track can put more water over this ground than a stronger one on a better one.

That is why the National Hurricane Center issues storm surge watches and warnings separately from wind warnings, and why the evacuation routes here are signed and run north.

Booking around it

• Take the refundable rate, particularly from mid-August through September, and read what the cancellation terms actually cover rather than assuming.
• Check that travel insurance names storm cancellation. Many policies exclude a named storm once it has been named.
• Follow the National Hurricane Center rather than a weather app during the trip.
• Expect hotels and casinos to close if the county orders an evacuation. That is the system working.

The routine summer version of all this is much smaller and much more likely: afternoon thunderstorms most days, lightning over open water, and the occasional day when the boats stay tied up.

The squadron in the middle of it

The aircraft that fly into these storms to measure them are based in Biloxi. The 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, the Hurricane Hunters, flies from Keesler Air Force Base inside the city limits, taking instrumented aircraft through the eyewall to collect the data the forecasts are built on.

Keesler is a working military installation and not a visitor attraction, so this is something to know about the place rather than something to plan a morning around. It is, though, a genuinely unusual fact about a city that has its own reasons to take the forecast seriously.