El Niño wind shear has the Atlantic forecast down to nine named storms, the fewest in over a decade if it verifies. The season's second storm still peaked at 60 mph and hit the Gulf Coast twice this week. Both things are true at once, and the history of quiet El Niño seasons says the second one matters more than it sounds.
When CSU cut its Atlantic forecast to nine named storms earlier this month, we wrote that a quiet forecast is not a safe one. It took less than two weeks for the season to supply the example. Tropical Storm Bertha formed in the Gulf around July 19, peaked near 60 mph on July 21, and made two Gulf Coast landfalls: it grazed southeastern Louisiana, then came ashore again near the Texas-Louisiana border on July 23, weakened to a tropical depression over eastern Texas that evening, and dissipated afterward. Heavy rain and flash flood warnings stretched from Florida to southern Texas. Nobody's seasonal forecast was wrong. That is the point of this post.
Bertha was the season's second named storm, after short-lived Arthur near the Texas coast in June. It organized in the Gulf on July 19, reached its 60 mph peak two days later, and never approached hurricane strength; forecasters did not expect it to. Its primary impacts came through water rather than wind: heavy rain, localized flash flooding, rough surf, and minor coastal flooding, with warnings that reached into southern Texas. Much of its heaviest rain stayed offshore, and no significant damage or deaths were reported. It crossed the coast twice, first grazing southeastern Louisiana near St. Bernard Parish and again near the Texas-Louisiana border, before weakening to a depression and dissipating over Texas.
A 60 mph storm that brought localized flooding and coastal impacts to portions of the Gulf Coast is, by the standards of a normal Atlantic season, a modest event. It is worth writing about precisely because this is not supposed to be a normal Atlantic season.
The suppression story is real and it is measurable. CSU has cut its seasonal forecast twice as El Niño strengthened, most recently on July 8, to 9 named storms, 4 hurricanes and 1 major hurricane. Against the 1991-2020 averages of 14, 7 and 3, that is a well-below-normal season, and if it verifies, nine named storms would be the fewest since 2014.
The mechanism behind the cuts is not a model abstraction. Hurricane specialist Michael Lowry reports that vertical wind shear over the Caribbean, the bellwether region for seasonal activity, surged from mid-June and stood second highest for the start of July in the satellite record back to 1979, behind only 2015, another strong El Niño year. July Caribbean shear is one of the better statistical predictors of how active August through October turns out: more shear in July, less activity at the peak. Lowry also notes the atmosphere is responding to this El Niño earlier than usual, plausibly because the equatorial Pacific warmed at a record-setting pace this spring.
We covered the mechanism in detail in June's reality check: El Niño shifts tropical Pacific convection eastward, which reorganizes the upper-level winds over the Atlantic and ratchets up shear, the scissor-like change in winds with height that tears apart organizing storms. The effect is especially important across the Caribbean and western tropical Atlantic, regions critical to the development and intensification of many major hurricanes.
A housekeeping item, because it is spreading. Some coverage this month has put "Niño 3.4" in the +2°C range. The weekly CPC data does not say that. As of the week centered July 15, the Niño 3.4 anomaly was +1.4°C, up from +1.2°C in early July. The +2 to +3°C numbers belong to Niño 1+2, the far eastern Pacific strip off South America, which reached +2.8°C in the same weekly data. We flagged this east-based fingerprint back in June; conflating the two regions overstates the benchmark index by a full degree.
And the slower official measure is more modest still: the RONI, CPC's primary three-month ENSO monitoring index since its February 2026 transition, stood at +0.47°C for April-June, just below the +0.5°C episode threshold. The ocean is running hot, the three-month relative index is only now crossing the line, and the CPC's forecast confidence comes from where things are heading, not where they are: an 81 percent chance of a very strong El Niño during October-December, and 97 percent odds the event lasts through early spring 2027, per the July 9 Diagnostic Discussion.
Here is the history that keeps this post honest. The 1983 season, following the 1982-83 super El Niño, produced just four named storms, one of the least active Atlantic seasons of the modern era. One of the four was Alicia, which hit the Houston-Galveston area as a Category 3 and was at the time the costliest hurricane in Texas history. The 1992 season produced seven named storms, four hurricanes and one major, numbers close to this year's forecast. The one major was Andrew.
These examples do not contradict the seasonal relationship. El Niño lowers the overall probability of Atlantic hurricanes and US landfalls, but it does not reduce that probability to zero. Seasonal forecasts count storms across the whole basin. Landfall risk for any one stretch of coast depends on whether a single storm finds a gap in the shear and a steering pattern pointed at land. El Niño makes those gaps rarer; it does not close them. In any given week the winds can relax enough for something to slip through, which is why forecasters repeat the same line every El Niño year: it only takes one.
El Niño is still building toward its forecast late-year peak, so the shear story should strengthen from here, not fade. Track the indices behind it on our teleconnections dashboard, and see the forecast this season is testing in our CSU forecast breakdown.