For the first time in three seasons, not a single hurricane made landfall in the United States. Florida, that nature-taunting peninsula jutting into some of the world's most hurricane-infested waters, had nary a good scare.

"It was wonderful," said Stephen P. Leatherman, who lives in Miami and is chair-professor of the International Hurricane Research Center at Florida International University. "We had a free year here."

The shell of Ida, a mutant leftover from the Gulf that went on to become a nor'easter along the mid-Atlantic Coast, ended up doing more damage to Jersey beaches than any tropical storm did to Florida's East Coast.

The upshot was a splendid season for U.S. taxpayers. Hurricanes have been major consumers of federal disaster dollars. Coming into this year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had committed $45.9 billion in the previous four fiscal years, or 86 percent of all disaster spending.

But this marked the second time in three seasons that FEMA issued no money-raining declarations for hurricanes or tropical storms.

And as researchers at Colorado State University pointed out, for the first time in a generation, the Atlantic Coast has been spared major land-falling hurricanes - defined as those with peak winds of at least 111 m.p.h. - for four consecutive seasons.

Could this represent a sea-change in the course hurricane activity? The experts say almost assuredly not.

They agree that taxpayers and coastal residents can thank El Niño, the warmer-than-normal surface waters covering a continent-size region of the tropical Pacific. El Niños occur periodically, and the one this year came on surprisingly strongly during the summer, reaching moderate strength.

The extra heat generated strong upper-air shearing winds from the west that ripped apart incipient tropical storms that try to form thousands of miles away in the subtropical Atlantic Ocean.

This was the quietest season since 1997. Not coincidentally, that also was an El Niño year.

Generally drier air over the Atlantic also was a factor this season, Colorado State's Philip J. Klotzbach said yesterday.

Overall this season, a total of nine named storms - those with winds of 39 m.p.h. or more - formed in the Atlantic Basin, which consists of the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. The average is 10. Of those, three became hurricanes; the average is six.

So whatever became of worries that global warming is stoking the world's hurricane-brewing waters? They're still out there.

Kerry Emanuel, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology hurricane expert, holds that a warmer world ultimately will mean warmer oceans and more intense hurricanes, a dud year notwithstanding. "The year-to-year fluctuations we aren't that interested in," Emanuel said yesterday.

Klotzbach is among those who is skeptical of any global-warming influence. Hurricane traffic generally has been brisk since 1995, and Klotzbach says that is because the Atlantic Basin is in an "active" period that typically lasts 25 to 40 years.

Global warming and quiet years aside, both Emanuel and Klotzbach agree that the real hurricane problem confronting the nation remains overdevelopment of the coasts. They were among nine scientists who have signed a statement to that effect.

Building trends, it says in part, "are setting us up for rapidly increasing human and economic losses from hurricane disasters."