As Lala Threatens Hawaii, El Niño’s Other Hurricane Signal Comes Into View

Nothing below attributes Lala’s formation, its intensity or its track to El Niño. Individual storms are weather. A seasonal outlook is a statement about the distribution that weather is drawn from, and those are different claims. What follows is about the distribution.

Two NOAA Outlooks, Opposite Directions, Same Driver

NOAA updated its Atlantic outlook on 6 August. Its combined eastern and central Pacific outlook was issued on 21 May, and NOAA states there will be no further updates to it. Read side by side, they are the same agency assessing the same developing El Niño signal at two different forecast vintages, and forecasting opposite outcomes in three basins.

NOAA states the link in its own words on both sides. The Pacific outlook: “El Niño conditions lead to more hurricane activity in the eastern and central Pacific,” and “Strong El Niño conditions are typically associated with dramatically elevated levels of activity in the central Pacific.” The Atlantic outlook is equally direct in the other direction, noting that every strong El Niño event in recent history has been associated with below-average Atlantic activity.

NOAA also quantifies the historical contrast. In the eastern Pacific, El Niño years average 13 to 18 named storms and roughly 30 more ACE points than La Niña years. In the central Pacific, El Niño years typically run 2 to 8 tropical depressions and storms against 0 to 4 in La Niña years.

It Is Not One Lever Pointing Two Ways

The tidy version of this, and the one this site has come close to implying, is that El Niño raises wind shear and shear is bad for hurricanes, so the Atlantic goes quiet and the Pacific gets the leftovers. That is too simple, and NOAA’s own documents do not say it.

On the Atlantic side, the mechanism is a stack of things. CPC’s outlook attributes the suppression to El Niño cancelling the trade-wind and vertical-shear reductions that the ongoing high-activity era would otherwise supply, with the CFS and NMME models both predicting above-normal vertical wind shear over the Main Development Region during August to October. It adds two conditions that have nothing to do with shear: Main Development Region sea surface temperatures were only +0.17°C above average in June, and, in CPC’s phrasing, “the warmth of the MDR is well below the tropical mean.” A near-average West African monsoon with rainfall displaced northward and inland is judged not optimal for development either.

That MDR point deserves a moment, because it rhymes with the relative index this site tracks. Absolute sea surface temperature still affects the energy available to storms, but relative tropical warmth can influence where large-scale ascent and convection are favoured. CPC judged the MDR’s modest absolute warmth less supportive because it remained cool relative to the exceptionally warm global tropics. Readers who followed the RONI explainer have met the same reasoning applied to the Niño 3.4 region.

On the Pacific side, NOAA’s 2026 outlook identifies a favourable combination rather than a single mechanism: El Niño, above-average sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific formation region, and forecast below-normal vertical wind shear over the central tropical Pacific. NOAA says that below-normal shear is historically associated with greater activity in both the eastern and central Pacific. In the region where most eastern Pacific storms form, between 110°W and 140°W, it forecast SSTs 0.5 to 1.5°C above average. In the Atlantic, by contrast, CFS and NMME forecast above-normal shear over the Main Development Region.

NOAA is candid that this is not a clean relationship. The same document describes the ENSO influence on Pacific activity as “highly dependent upon the background sea surface temperature patterns,” names the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and Atlantic Multidecadal Variability as competing modulators whose combined impacts “remain a challenge” to predict, and notes that models disagreed on shear off the Mexican coast, with the outcome affecting whether activity concentrates in the eastern or central basin.

So the honest sentence is longer than the tidy one: El Niño generally makes the Atlantic more hostile, chiefly through shear and the loss of locally conducive conditions, while making parts of the eastern and central Pacific more favourable through a different regional combination of circulation, convection, sea surface temperature and shear. Same driver, two mechanisms, not one mechanism with a sign flip.

The ENSO Forecast Underneath the Atlantic Outlook Has Already Moved

Here is something that falls out of reading the documents in order, and it is the reason to check the date on any seasonal outlook.

NOAA’s 6 August Atlantic outlook builds on CPC’s July ENSO forecast. It cites a 90% chance of a strong or very strong El Niño during August to October, defined as RONI at or above +1.5°C, and a 48% chance of a very strong event, RONI at or above +2.0°C, for that season.

That 48% matches the August-September-October row of CPC’s July strength table exactly. CPC issued a new strength table on 13 August, a week after the hurricane outlook. In it, the same row now reads 75%. IAMElNino.com analysis, comparing the July and August archived strength tables.

This does not mean the Atlantic outlook is wrong. It was correct against the information available when it was issued, and CPC says explicitly that if El Niño becomes very strong in summer the season could land toward the lower end of its ranges, which is the direction the revision points. It does mean the ENSO table was issued seven days after the Atlantic outlook, and a reader comparing them should know which came first.

What This Tells You Specifically About Lala

Nothing specific. The seasonal outlook cannot tell us why Lala formed, how strong it became or why it followed this track. Lala is nevertheless occurring within a basin whose seasonal environment NOAA expected El Niño to make more favourable for tropical-cyclone activity. That is population-level context, not individual-storm attribution.

A seasonal outlook says something about how many storms a basin is likely to produce over months. It says nothing about whether a particular storm forms, how strong it gets, or where it goes. CPHC’s outlook says so in its own text: it “does not indicate where or when any storms may affect land,” and is “not a landfall forecast.” CPC says the same about the Atlantic.

An above-normal central Pacific outlook does not, by itself, explain Lala’s formation, intensity or track, any more than a below-normal Atlantic outlook explains the two named storms the Atlantic has already produced. Both basins produce storms in every kind of season. What changes is the count you should expect over a season, and even that is a probability rather than a promise.

Uncertainty Worth Naming

• The Pacific outlooks are from May and will not be updated. NOAA states plainly: “There will be no further updates to these outlooks.” So the 15-22 and 5-13 ranges were set before three months of ENSO strengthening, and unlike the Atlantic they get no August revision. That is a limitation of the comparison, not an oversight.
• The Pacific outlook was issued when El Niño was still a forecast. At issuance CPC gave a 96% chance of El Niño during the season and a 66% chance of a moderate or stronger event during July to September. The ENSO component has strengthened beyond what NOAA anticipated in May, but that alone does not determine where the final cyclone count will fall within the range.
• Interbasin relationships are genuinely unsettled science. That is NOAA’s characterisation, not a hedge added here.
• Seasonal outlooks are not landfall forecasts. Neither agency claims otherwise, and neither should anyone citing them.

What to Watch

• CPHC and NWS Honolulu for anything operational. Not this page, and not any seasonal outlook.
• Eastern Pacific counts against 15-22 named storms, since that outlook will remain a fixed benchmark through the season.
• Atlantic named-storm count against the 7-13 range, with two already recorded.
• Whether coverage keeps treating shear as the whole story. It is the largest single term on the Atlantic side and not the only one, and it is not the mechanism on the Pacific side.
• The date on any outlook you read. The Atlantic one is built on a July ENSO forecast that has since been revised upward.

The Short Version

NOAA expects a below-normal Atlantic season, 75% likely, and above-normal eastern Pacific (70% likely) and central Pacific seasons, and cites El Niño in both documents. That is not a contradiction and it is not one lever flipped: the Atlantic suppression runs mainly through shear plus the loss of locally favourable conditions and a Main Development Region that is warm in absolute terms but cool relative to the tropics, while the Pacific enhancement runs through a different regional combination: El Niño, above-average sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific formation region, and forecast below-normal shear over the central tropical Pacific. Meanwhile a hurricane is passing Hawaii this weekend, and none of the above allows us to attribute Lala’s formation, intensity or track to El Niño. For that, read the Central Pacific Hurricane Center.