No hurricane season in the decades since satellites circled the Earth has passed without a hurricane, but there is a slim possibility that 2026 could buck that climatological truth.
Major benchmarks of the season have already come and gone without a hurricane.
Aug. 11 is the average date for the first hurricane to form. The peak of the season came Sept. 10 — not even a rumor of a hurricane. Until this year, Sept. 11 was thelatest a hurricanehad formed with Gustav in 2002 and 2013’s Humberto both earning the designation coincidentally at 8 p.m.
Although there have been five named tropical storms this year, a brutish El Niño has brought hurricanes to heel.
Colorado State University researcher Phil Klotzbach estimates there is a 15% chance that 2026
will end without a hurricane, which is defined asa tropical cyclone with sustained wind speeds of at least 74 mph.
He puts the odds at 40% that no major hurricanes of Category 3 or stronger will form.
“While any development looks highly unlikely for the foreseeable future, we still have a lot of season left to go,” said Klotzbach, who is the lead writer of CSU’s seasonal hurricane forecasts. “I doubt we get a hurricane forming in the deep tropics, but something forming in the subtropics wouldn’t be too much of a stretch.”
Hurricane season runs June 1 through Nov. 30.
Will a hurricane form this month?
As of Sept. 11, the National Hurricane Center was not expecting anything to form for the seven days ahead and it hadn’t issued a forecast advisory for a system since Sept. 3 when Edouard was raining out over Texas.
The Climate Prediction Center is signaling a yawning area east of Florida and over the Northern Bahamas that may be mustering for tropical development during the week of Sept. 23 through Sept. 29.
But Andy Hazelton, a scientist at the University of Miami’s Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, said “a hurricane-free September is definitely a possibility at this rate.”
An odd peak season burp of Saharan dust, combined with an El Niño-influenced balm of sinking air where fists of cumulus clouds should be building, and an unrelenting gale of storm-killing wind shear has created a hurricane desert in the tropical Atlantic.
Saharan dust, also known as the Saharan Air Layer (SAL) is warm dry air that deters the formation of thunderstorms and tropical cyclones. It’s born on the African Sahel and coughed off the coast with the biggest gouts happening between about mid-June and mid-August.
Jason Dunion, a University of Miami hurricane researcher working with NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, called the recent Saharan dust burst unusual and compared it to something more likely to occur in August.
“This SAL outbreak is larger and reaching farther west than you’d expect in mid-ish September,” he said. “There have been a few impressive tropical waves over Africa over the last several days and those have helped kick up this recent outbreak and the impressive amount of dust that’s embedded in it.”
The tropical waves are the seedlings for hurricanes. This time of year, long-track Cabo Verde storms can form from the waves as they slug down summer-warmed waters in their travel toward the Caribbean.
But waves coming off the coast have mostly been pulverized by scissoring wind shear or evaporated by dry air.
“Wind shear is the 800-pound gorilla in the room,” said Matthew Rosencrans, the lead hurricane season forecaster for NOAA. “You saw Dolly down in the tropics develop and as it moved toward the Lesser Antilles, the wind shear just came in and it couldn’t sustain itself.”
Tropical Storm Dolly formed Aug. 27 and struggled to maintain the bare minimum 40 mph wind speeds to keep its title, but was ultimately kaput the next day.
Of this year’s five tropical storms, only Bertha in the Gulf lasted much longer than 24 hours.
The frailty of the storms is underscored in the season’s “accumulated cyclone energy”, or ACE, which is a measure of a storm’s strength and longevity.
An average hurricane season through Sept. 10 has an ACE of 58.
This season, it’s a paltry 4 with a total of only 6.75 days with a named storm active in the Atlantic basin. The average number of storm days for this time of year is 34.
Rosencrans declined to make a prediction on the chance for a hurricane-free season.
He said records from 1914 and 1907 reflect no hurricanes, but that the data from those years is less reliable without orbiting sentinels and fewer ships at sea relaying data.
In 1914, which was an El Niño year, only one tropical storm was recorded during the entire season, according to AccuWeather. The unnamed system made landfall in June in Florida near the Georgia border as a tropical storm.
NOAA’s official 2026 seasonal forecast is for seven to 13 named storms, two to six hurricanes and zero to two major hurricanes.
An average hurricane season has 14 named storms and seven hurricanes. Of the seven hurricanes, three are expected to be Category 3 or higher during a normal season.
Rosencrans said there have been several years without major hurricanes. But there have also been big El Niño years, such as this one, that have produced brawny Cat 3-landfalling storms.
Most recently for Florida, Hurricane Idalia made landfall in the Big Bend region as a Cat 3 in 2023, an El Niño year.
“All it takes is the right wave coming off Africa that lines up with the wind shear being a little lower for four to five days and it hitting a pocket of warm water,” Rosencrans said about the potential for a hurricane this season. “It hasn’t been busy and it may not be busy, but if a storm comes to your area, it feels like a busy season for you.”
Kimberly Miller is a journalist for the USA TODAY NETWORK FLORIDA. She covers weather, the environment and critters as the Embracing Florida reporter. If you have news tips, please send them to kmiller@pbpost.com. You can get all of Florida’s best content directly in your inbox each weekday by signing up for the free newsletter, Florida TODAY, at palmbeachpost.com/newsletters.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Could 2026 go hurricane-free as El Niño dominates the Atlantic?
