Where have all the Atlantic hurricanes gone?

The Atlantic is quiet – record quiet – this hurricane season thanks to an enormous El Niño that crushes storms before they get going.

No Atlantic hurricanes have formed yet this year and none are likely to form for at least another week, even though this would normally be the peak of the season, according to the National Hurricane Center. Only five relatively weak and brief tropical storms have spun up this season.

On Saturday, 2026 set a record for the longest a season has begun without a storm that has reached winds of 74 mph (119 kph) to qualify as a hurricane – at least in the satellite era, said Nick Novella, a meteorologist at the United States government’s Weather Prediction Center. Before the 1950s there were a few years where no hurricanes were recorded this late in the season, but meteorologists don’t trust those records because ocean monitoring wasn’t complete.