El Niño suppresses Atlantic hurricanes; 2026 could be first season without one since satellite era

September came and went without a single Atlantic hurricane for the first time in more than thirty years. It was an unusual silence in what is normally the most violent month of the year—the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season, when warm waters and favorable atmospheric conditions typically conspire to spin up the most powerful storms. Four named tropical storms did form that month: Edouard, Fay, Gonzalo, and Hanna. But none of them crossed the threshold into hurricane status, and all but Edouard stayed far out in the open ocean, away from populated coasts.

With November 30 marking the official end of the Atlantic hurricane season, and with the typical peak already behind us on a downward trend, forecasters are now contemplating something that has not happened since satellite monitoring began in the 1960s—an entire season that produces zero hurricanes. The last recorded year without a hurricane in the Atlantic was 1914, but that was before satellites existed, so no one can say with certainty whether storms actually failed to form or simply went undetected. If 2026 closes without a hurricane, it will be the first confirmed hurricane-free season in the modern meteorological record.

The culprit is El Niño, the periodic warming of tropical Pacific waters that reshapes weather patterns across the globe. When El Niño takes hold, it shifts wind patterns in ways that devastate Atlantic hurricane development. Upper-level winds over the Atlantic intensify, creating what meteorologists call wind shear—a condition where winds at different altitudes blow at different speeds and in different directions. These violent wind shears act like invisible scissors, tearing apart the thunderstorms that would otherwise organize into tropical systems. The stronger the shear, the harder it becomes for a storm to maintain its structure and intensify.

The National Hurricane Center had predicted this quiet season back in May, forecasting only eight to fourteen named storms for the entire season, with just three to six expected to become hurricanes and only one to three reaching major hurricane status. That forecast was built on the expectation of a very strong El Niño. As September ended with no hurricanes, forecasters at Colorado State University suggested that the strong El Niño would likely continue to suppress Atlantic activity over the following two weeks, and the National Hurricane Center saw no signs of tropical storm or hurricane development in the immediate forecast period.

But while El Niño strangles the Atlantic, it feeds the Pacific with exceptional fury. The eastern North Pacific has already recorded seventeen named storms, nine of which became hurricanes—seven of them major. Sea surface temperatures in a key region of the central-eastern Pacific have shattered previous records, now exceeding the mark set during the very strong El Niño of 2015. The accumulated cyclone energy—a measure of the total power released by storms—is running at two and a half times the normal level for this point in the season. El Niño is forecast to continue strengthening through November and December, reaching its peak intensity during those months.

The mechanism is straightforward: warmer Pacific waters provide more energy for storms to feed on, and the wind patterns during El Niño favor storm development in that basin. The same El Niño that creates those favorable conditions in the Pacific simultaneously creates hostile ones in the Atlantic. It is a zero-sum redistribution of hurricane activity across the ocean basins, driven by a single large-scale climate pattern. As the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season enters its final two months with no hurricanes yet recorded, the possibility of making history—of closing out an entire season without a single hurricane—grows more concrete with each passing week.