by Ross Williams, Georgia Recorder, [This article first appeared in the Georgia Recorder, republished with permission]
August 25, 2026
It’s been a quiet Atlantic hurricane season so far – the season is nearly halfway through, and there hasn’t been a single hurricane. But a slow start doesn’t guarantee a slow finish, and peak storm season still lies ahead.
2026 has had the slowest start to the hurricane season of any year since 2022, said AccuWeather lead hurricane expert Alex DaSilva, when the Atlantic basin finished August without a single hurricane. That season went on to produce seven hurricanes between September and November, but AccuWeather does not predict another late season surge this year.
Any hurricane that would make landfall in the U.S. would be the first since October 2024 after going all of 2025 without a hurricane from the Atlantic coming ashore, according to AccuWeather.
The wind conditions in the Atlantic are not favorable to hurricanes, said National Weather Service meteorologist Sam Marlow.
“A couple of things that you need for hurricanes, you need really warm ocean waters and you need fairly calm winds aloft, so up in the atmosphere,” he said. “And right now the one thing that we don’t really have is those calm winds aloft.”
El Niño, a recurring climate pattern causing warm waters in the Pacific Ocean, is giving east coasters a hand by increasing wind shear in the Atlantic.
“These waters basically form a high pressure bubble that kind of guides the jet stream and the flow of the jet stream into a pattern that is not conducive to hurricanes,” Marlow said. “What it can lead to, at least for our area, is a slightly wetter pattern as we go into the winter months, but other than that, the biggest impact would be tamping down those tropical effects.”
Marlow stressed that Georgians should not become complacent just because there haven’t been any hurricanes in a while.
“Even though we are in an El Niño pattern, it doesn’t mean that we’re not going to get any kind of tropical systems,” he said. “So still stay aware of things as we go through September through October and November.”
Marlow added that Hurricane Andrew spawned during an El Niño year. That 1992 storm caused havoc when it made landfall as a Category 5 hurricane, leaving 65 dead and causing more than $28 billion in damages, according to the National Weather Service.
“It’s not something we can really put our guards down for,” he said.
DaSilva said historically, up to 70% of tropical storms form from late August through the end of November.
He added that a tropical wave coming off of Africa is moving into a pocket of low wind shear and high moisture. While many forecasting models predict a storm that curves into the open ocean, DaSilva said people on the Eastern Seaboard should keep their eyes on this wave as it progresses across the Atlantic.
AccuWeather has scaled back its predictions for the season from its July forecast. Their model now predicts nine named storms, down from 11. Three of those are expected to be hurricanes with one major hurricane, down from a predicted five hurricanes including two major hurricanes.
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