Traditionally, this week is the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season, the busiest time of year for storms to spin up and barrel east into North America.
Instead, nearly four months into the season, and with two more to go, not a single hurricane has formed, a drought not seen in more than eight decades.
While the inactivity is unusual, meteorologists said it is explainable — and they warned against confusing a quiet start with an quiet finish.
Not since 1941 has the Atlantic gone this far into a season without a hurricane. There have been five systems that grew strong enough to become named tropical storms, but none had the time or the right conditions to intensify into hurricanes.
In May, forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted a below-normal season with three to six hurricanes, because of the gathering intensity of the El Niño weather pattern. But the absence of any hurricanes at all has caught experts off guard.
“This lack of activity is still surprising,” said Lindsey Long, a meteorologist with the NOAA unit that issues seasonal forecasts. “We have just hit the peak of the season, which occurs on Sept. 10, and it has been a very quiet week. but there is still a lot of time for a hurricane to form.”
The primary reason has indeed been El Niño. The weather pattern has unleashed dramatic storm activity in the Pacific, including two hurricanes that wreaked havoc on Hawaii, but it historically has acted as a dampener in the Atlantic.
Storm systems need certain conditions in place in order to become hurricanes, and El Niño tends to rob the Atlantic of at least some of them.
This summer, a strong vertical wind shear — the changing of wind speed and direction with height — across the tropical Atlantic and Caribbean has ripped many potential storms apart before they can become hurricanes. It’s almost like a protective shield around North America, destroying storms before they can get close.
Yet that protective shield creates a danger, warned Jamie Rhome, the deputy director of the National Hurricane Center.
This year’s quiet season comes after one that was unusual in other ways: 2025 had five hurricanes, including Melissa, which slammed into Jamaica after becoming one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded. But none hit the mainland United States, which hasn’t recorded a hurricane making landfall in nearly two years.
“We can’t let the public think that means that their risk is necessarily lessened,” Mr. Rhome said.
Hurricanes that do form during El Niño years tend to develop quickly and close to land, in the Gulf of Mexico or just off the East Coast, rather than taking days to move across the open ocean. Mr. Rhome pointed to Tropical Storm Edouard, which nearly reached hurricane strength before it ran into the Louisiana and Texas coasts this month.
Which is why hurricane experts say the season isn’t over until it’s over.
Tiny “cracks” can open in the wind shear, allowing a system to escalate rapidly with little lead time. That’s what happened with Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which flattened homes across Florida and left an estimated 50,000 thousand people homeless.
Even with advancements in computer modeling, forecasters struggle to pinpoint when those fleeting windows of optimal weather will occur.
“You’re talking about a tipping point between a system that can develop and develop quick, and a nothing burger,” Mr. Rhome said. “The systems that do form can ramp up really quickly close to land, without the traditional lead times.”
Philip Klotzbach, a hurricane expert at Colorado State University, noted that only four Atlantic seasons on record have ended with one or zero hurricanes: 1905 and 1926 had one; 1907 and 1914 had none. The first and only hurricane of 1905 formed on Oct. 8; in 1941, the first arrived on Sept. 21.
“Of course, I think it’s way too early to say that we’re going to have zero, or even one, hurricane this season,” Mr. Klotzbach said.
For the next week at least, no hurricanes are expected to form, according to the National Hurricane Center. A huge plume of extremely dry air and dust floating across the Atlantic from the Sahara this weekend is just another thing they would have to overcome.
But the conditions that have stifled hurricane formation have had another effect that could give nascent storms a boost: they have kept cloud cover light, allowing ocean temperatures in the Atlantic to warm in recent weeks, leaving vast amounts of energy waiting to be tapped.
Mr. Klotzbach cautioned that quiet conditions rarely last long. El Niño tends to decay as quickly as it forms, and Atlantic waters often remain unusually warm through El Niño winters.
“So next year on ‘peak season day,’” Mr. Klotzbach said, “I don’t think we’ll be talking about how quiet it is.”
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