Through October 7, the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season has produced zero hurricanes. The latest date on record for a season’s first hurricane is October 8, 1905. A system now organizing in the southwestern Gulf of Mexico, designated Tropical Depression Nine by the National Hurricane Center at 5 p.m. EDT on October 6, is forecast to become Tropical Storm Isaias within a day and a hurricane by Thursday, October 8 — which would tie, not break, the 121-year-old record, as AccuWeather has reported.
That 1905 mark comes from a different bookkeeping exercise than the one everyone has been watching all year. The question since September has not been when the first hurricane arrives but whether one arrives at all. Only two Atlantic seasons on record, 1907 and 1914, ended with no hurricane whatsoever, and as Eric Berger wrote in Ars Technica, that record is shakier than it looks: before transatlantic aircraft reconnaissance began around World War II, a hurricane that stayed over open ocean and missed shipping lanes could go entirely unrecorded. The modern, continuously observed record — aircraft and then satellites — has never produced a hurricane-free season. If Isaias strengthens as forecast, 2026 won’t be the one to do it either, but it will come closer than any season since the satellite era began.
The cause of both records is the same number, measured a different way. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, in its September 10 ENSO diagnostic discussion, put the Niño-3.4 index — the benchmark strip of the equatorial Pacific used to grade El Niño strength — at +1.8°C in August, with the Niño-1+2 region off South America running +3.4°C and Niño-3 at +2.5°C. The agency gives better than a 90 percent chance the event stays “very strong” through winter, and a 75 percent chance that the October–December reading qualifies as historic: a three-month anomaly of +2.5°C or more, which would exceed every El Niño in the 1950-present record. The next update is due October 8 — the same day Isaias is forecast to reach hurricane strength.
El Niño works on the Atlantic by cranking up wind shear — the difference in wind speed and direction between the surface and the upper atmosphere, which tears a developing storm’s core apart before it can organize. Kristen Corbosiero, an atmospheric scientist, has put shear over the Atlantic’s main development region this season at roughly 45 mph above what a tropical cyclone can tolerate, a figure reported in CBS News’s account of the season. Phil Klotzbach, the Colorado State University hurricane researcher who has run seasonal forecasts since the 1990s, put it more bluntly.
Normally we have to blame like four or five different things, but this year, I think we really can pretty much put all the blame on El Niño.
The numbers back him up. Klotzbach’s own tracking puts Atlantic storm activity, measured as Accumulated Cyclone Energy — a metric that multiplies a storm’s wind speed squared by how long it persists, summed across the season — at 7 percent of the seasonal-to-date normal, the lowest ACE on record dating to 1950. NOAA’s own forecasts tracked the collapse in real time. Its May 21 outlook called for 8 to 14 named storms and 3 to 6 hurricanes, at 70 percent confidence, against a 1991-2020 average of 14 named storms and 7 hurricanes. By August 6, the hurricane range had dropped to 2 to 6, and the odds of a below-normal season had climbed to 75 percent from 55 percent. AccuWeather’s October revision cut the range to 0 to 2 hurricanes — the first forecast of the season, by its own account, to put zero on the table.
The same El Niño that starves the Atlantic feeds the Pacific, through a mechanism that runs in the opposite direction: warmer water and lower shear over the eastern Pacific’s own main development region let storms form and intensify with little resistance. By early October the eastern and central Pacific basins combined had produced 20 named storms and 10 hurricanes, seven of them major, with three reaching Category 5 — tying 1994, 2002 and 2018 for the most Category 5 Pacific hurricanes in a season, according to figures reported by Carrier Management. The standout was Hurricane Polo, which underwent rapid intensification off Mexico to 180 mph winds and a central pressure of 892 millibars — the third-strongest eastern Pacific hurricane on record by wind speed.
| From | To | How |
|---|---|---|
| El Niño SST spike (eastern equatorial Pacific) | Wind shear rises (over Atlantic main development region) | raises |
| Wind shear rises (over Atlantic main development region) | Atlantic storms torn apart | disrupts |
| El Niño SST spike (eastern equatorial Pacific) | Warm water, low shear (eastern Pacific basin) | extends |
| Warm water, low shear (eastern Pacific basin) | Pacific storms intensify unchecked | fuels |
Based on NOAA Climate Prediction Center; Phil Klotzbach, Colorado State University
The storm cutting it close
Isaias exists because the Gulf of Mexico, unlike the open Atlantic’s main development region, isn’t under heavy shear right now. Local shear near the developing system was running 15-20 knots (17-23 mph) as of this week, according to Yale Climate Connections — well below the roughly 45 mph excess Corbosiero cited for the Atlantic’s open-ocean breeding ground. The National Hurricane Center put the odds of tropical formation at 60 percent over 48 hours and 80 percent over seven days before upgrading the system to a depression. Brian McNoldy, a University of Miami hurricane researcher, cited Google DeepMind’s Weather Lab ensemble giving the system a 93 percent chance of becoming the season’s first hurricane and a 43 percent chance of reaching Category 3 or stronger.
The NHC’s working forecast, per Yale Climate Connections, has Isaias reaching the central U.S. Gulf Coast by Friday night at up to Category 2 strength, with sustained winds as high as 100 mph; model tracks cluster on landfall somewhere east of New Orleans, with the official cone stretching from central Louisiana to the western Florida Panhandle. The Weather Prediction Center has issued a level-2-of-4 slight risk of excessive rainfall for the central Gulf Coast on Friday, widening Saturday to a swath from eastern Louisiana to South Carolina, with some coastal areas forecast for 5 to 10 inches of rain.
What’s making the storm possible is water temperature. Sea surface temperatures along the system’s path are running 30-31°C (86-88°F) — the warmest on record for this point in October in the Gulf. Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index attributes readings that warm in the western Gulf to human-caused warming, estimating such temperatures are several hundred times more likely now than in a pre-warming climate, a figure reported by Yale Climate Connections. None of that guarantees a strong storm: forecast confidence is still low enough that NOAA flew a Gulfstream-IV jet through the system Tuesday evening to sample its environment, with hurricane-hunter missions beginning Wednesday.
Even a Category 2 landfall reshuffles the season’s two separate superlatives. A hurricane by Thursday settles the hurricane-free question that drove coverage through September — Klotzbach had put the odds of a fully hurricane-free 2026 at roughly 50 percent as of mid-month, as this site reported — while leaving the latest-first-hurricane record from 1905 either tied to the day or broken by a day, depending on which advisory cycle the NHC’s upgrade lands in. Gulf Coast emergency managers, meanwhile, are testing response plans against a season that one Florida assessment warned was built around an average year, not a record-strong El Niño winter.
The next CPC ENSO update, due October 8, will say whether the El Niño is crossing into historic territory in real time, in the same window the Gulf storm is forecast to cross into hurricane strength. Whether Isaias ties the 1905 record or misses it by a day is, at this point, a matter of hours and an NHC advisory cycle — the kind of margin that makes a 121-year-old number interesting rather than academic.