El Niño's effects aren't confined to the Pacific. One of its most reliable downstream impacts is on the Atlantic hurricane season, and 2026 is shaping up as a textbook example.
The Mechanism
El Niño strengthens upper-level westerly winds over the tropical Atlantic and Caribbean. That increased wind shear tears apart the vertical structure that tropical storms need to organize and intensify, essentially decapitating storms before they can strengthen. At the same time, the warmer central and eastern Pacific tends to see the opposite effect, with hurricane season there often running more active than normal.
The shear signal is one of the better-established teleconnections in the field, which is why forecasters act on it early and why the revisions this season have all pointed the same way.
Note the attribution carefully, because it is easy to garble. The 8 to 14 range and the 55 percent below-normal probability are NOAA's May 21 seasonal outlook. Colorado State University publishes its own separate forecast, and it is CSU that has been revising downward through the season, from 13 named storms in its early outlook to 11 on June 10 and to 9 on July 8. If the July figure verifies it would be the fewest since 2014.
What Has Actually Happened
This is where the earlier version of this page needed correcting. Written in mid-June, it said the season had opened with no tropical activity at all. That was true then. It is not true now, and the difference matters more than the original point did.
Tropical Storm Arthur formed on June 17, bringing flash flooding and tornadoes to the South before dissipating. It was disorganised and short-lived, which is roughly what a sheared environment should produce.
Tropical Storm Bertha was less obliging. It formed in mid-July, made landfall in St Bernard Parish, Louisiana on July 22 about 40 miles east of downtown New Orleans, curled back into the Gulf, regained strength and made a second landfall near the Louisiana-Texas state line on July 23 with 45 mph winds.
So the record through the start of August is two named storms, one of them a double landfall, in a season forecast to be among the quietest in a decade. Both things are true simultaneously, and the tension between them is the whole point.
Suppression Is a Shifted Distribution, Not a Shield
A below-normal forecast is a statement about the expected number of storms across the basin over a whole season. It says nothing about whether any particular storm forms, where it goes, or how much damage it does. A quiet season with one landfall is worse for the people under that landfall than a busy season that stays offshore.
NWS Director Ken Graham put the operational version plainly when NOAA issued its outlook: "It only takes one storm to make for a very bad season." That is not boilerplate. 1992 produced only seven named storms, and one of them was Hurricane Andrew.
This is also why the language matters in coverage. Framing that describes shifted odds survives a landfall. Framing that describes a barrier does not, which is what we examined in our piece on the Atlantic Niña and the "atmospheric shield". For the specific case, see Bertha Is the Asterisk, and for the forecast revisions in detail, CSU's quietest-in-a-decade outlook.
The Other Side of the Basin
Atlantic suppression is only half the pattern. The same circulation changes that raise shear over the Atlantic tend to reduce it over the eastern and central Pacific, where warmer water also supplies more energy. Eastern Pacific seasons often run more active during El Niño, which receives a fraction of the coverage the Atlantic story gets, largely because fewer of those storms threaten populated coastlines.
Calling reduced Atlantic activity a silver lining is therefore fair for the U.S. Gulf and East Coasts specifically, and incomplete as a global statement. The storms are not cancelled. Some of them move.
What Would Change This Picture
The forecast rests on El Niño persisting through the peak of the season, which runs from mid-August into October. CPC's July 9 Diagnostic Discussion put an 81 percent probability on a very strong event during October to December and a 97 percent probability that El Niño conditions persist through early spring 2027, so the shear mechanism is very likely to still be in place when Atlantic activity normally peaks.
The things that would undercut it: a materially lower very-strong probability at the next CPC Diagnostic Discussion on August 13, a weakening of the observed upper-level westerly anomaly over the tropical Atlantic, or simply the reminder that seasonal counts are a distribution and individual seasons land where they land. Watch the shear analyses through late August, which is when the climatological peak begins and when a suppressed season either holds or does not.