The Atlantic hurricane season just set a new record. While it’s not unusual for the Atlantic hurricane season to take a while to get going—the typical peak in storm activity is late August through September—it is unusual not to see a single hurricane form by September 11. But that’s exactly what has happened this year for the very first time since reliable records began.
And with no likely contenders set to turn into a hurricane for at least the next seven days, that record will extend. In fact, the 2026 season is easily set to have the latest-forming hurricane whenever one does spin up, meteorologist Michael Lowry wrote on his blog. That’s assuming that one spins up at all.
There has been some meager storm activity this year, with five tropical storms so far. These have included Tropical Storm Dolly, which coincidentally formed only days after singer Dolly Parton died.
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The reason the Atlantic has been so quiet this year is the same reason the eastern Pacific—and particularly Hawaii—has seen a bonanza of storms: El Niño. The cyclical climate phenomenon features an eastward shift in a pool of warm water in the tropical Pacific that changes where heat enters the atmosphere. That shift causes a domino effect in the atmosphere, altering major wind patterns around the world.
Over the Atlantic, El Niño tends to create more of what is called wind shear, or winds that travel in different directions and speeds at various levels of the atmosphere, which cuts off the convection that fuels tropical cyclones. As a result, any seeds of storms may have ample warm ocean water to feed on, but wind shear cuts them down before they can really develop.
On the flip side, wind shear decreases over the eastern Pacific during an El Niño, leaving more room for storms to spin up into destructive beasts. And shear has been particularly low around Hawaii, leaving it uncharacteristically vulnerable to storms.
This El Niño is a doozy, already at record strength for this time of the year and expected to be among the strongest events in living memory. Its effects on the world’s weather will be more pronounced than in the past. And there is more recent evidence that climate change may be driving more of these “Super El Niños.”
Lowry noted that “it’s still more likely than not we’ll see a hurricane or two on the back side of the season” because there hasn’t been a season in the reliable records (going back to about 1950) without a single hurricane. There are no recorded hurricanes for the 1907 and 1914 seasons, but those happened before we had satellites to spot storms that remained out at sea, he explained. But if there were to be a year without a single Atlantic hurricane, “this would probably be the year,” Lowry said.
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