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The lack of hurricanes also means that heat is not being removed from the Gulf of Mexico. Therefore, future hurricanes are likely to be more powerful and more frequent.
Weather patterns in the Americas and Asia change in the summer through winter months. Rainfall changes throughout the Americas, and Asia sees worsening floods and storms.
Just because the Atlantic sees fewer hurricanes doesn't mean it's out of the woods - the number of winter storms increases.
> I thought the warming waters were supposed to increase the number of hurricanes?
That is a question. I suppose the answer is yes, you thought that.
You likely thought that because - Holy cow. Year after year after year of explosively strengthening Cat5 storms is fairly well unprecedented.
source: FL coastal resident and repeated hurricane relief worker.
Equally unprecedented is the supercharged El Nino that's been interfering with the Atlantic Basin's ability to form storms, in proportion to it's record development.
Nitpick: El Niño doesn't interfere with storm formation directly, it increases vertical wind shear over the Atlantic, which tears storms apart. Also IIRC Cat 5s aren't annual there, but you're right that warm water and shear pull in opposite directions.
Has anyone actually measured that though? Fewer storms might just be a short-window effect, and a season with zero hurricanes by Sept 12 looks more like noise or wind shear than a trend. How many decades of data before "fewer but stronger" is distinguishable from luck?
Disagree with treating this as a test of the warming theory. One quiet season is weather. Nobody predicted every year gets more storms, just a shift in the odds. Ask what the ten-year average looks like instead of the first twelve days of September.
In 1877, 50 million people starved to death from El Niño. The charts are looking far worse in 2026 (thankfully our supply chains and infrastructure are much better today)
We can't stop the storms but we can work to avert the impacts and save lives.
One thing we need help with is how to provide detailed recommendations per city/address to people based on historical El Niños. What are local emergency notification services, where can you get free sandbags, should you expect floods, droughts, tornadoes? What backup services are there if 911 goes down? (If you have ideas, here's our github: https://github.com/titojankowski/elninoready)
Our first step is bringing together people at New York Climate Week so that's what's up on the site right now.
> In 1877, 50 million people starved to death from El Niño. The charts are looking far worse in 2026 (thankfully our supply chains and infrastructure are much better today)
Yes, much better supply chains and infrastructure are examples of how growth and innovation make us more resilient.
No, not really. Massively fewer rain storms usually isn't good news in the long run. You kind of need rains to keep things from being too dry. I don't know about your body chemistry but water is pretty critical in mine.
I'd love more storms where I'm at. Things have been exceptionally hot and dry. I don't want giant massive Cat 5 storms, but a severe lack of tropical storms and smaller hurricanes hasn't been good.
And as others have mentioned, hurricanes end up cooling off the waters. The lack of these storms from developing due to atmospheric effects destroying them before they grow means the heat builds. So when El Nino goes away, we're likely to get even worse storms soon after.
Only in the Atlantic Ocean. In the Pacific, Hawaii has had back-to-back hurricanes for the last few weeks. Lala, Lowell, Karina, Norbert. They haven't made landfall there, but have come close enough to send flash floods and high storm surges.
One quiet stretch isn't really a trend. As far as I know, the climatological peak is mid-September and late-season catch-up happens often, so I'd hold off celebrating. Wind shear and dry Saharan air seem like the usual suspects, but that's forecaster speculation, not settled.
Vertical wind shear is the thing to watch. I've followed the CIMSS shear maps for a few seasons, and when El Niño sets up, the upper-level westerlies over the Caribbean shred anything trying to organize. Warm water alone doesn't cut it.
https://news.wfsu.org/state-news/2026-08-31/rising-humid-hea...