Was the 2026 hurricane forecast a bust? So far, six storms. Zero hurricanes.

If the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season ended today, the forecasts would look pretty awful.

But it doesn’t end today.

That distinction matters, because NOAA’s preseason forecast actually got something important right: 2026 was likely to be a quieter-than-normal hurricane season.

What forecasters didn’t anticipate was anything this quiet.

As of September 24, here’s the Atlantic scoreboard:

6 named storms.

0 hurricanes.

0 major hurricanes.

ACE: 6.6, about 92% below normal for this point in the season.

Arthur. Bertha. Cristobal. Dolly. Edouard. Fay.

Six names have come off the list.

Not one has become a hurricane.

So was the 2026 hurricane forecast a bust?

Not officially. There are still more than two months left in hurricane season.

But if you want to understand why the forecast and reality have separated this dramatically, you have to go back to what scientists thought the atmosphere would do before the season even started.

What did the 2026 hurricane forecast actually predict?

A quiet season. Just nowhere near this quiet.

NOAA’s May outlook called for 8 to 14 named storms, 3 to 6 hurricanes and 1 to 3 major hurricanes. It gave the Atlantic a 55% chance of a below-normal season.

Colorado State University was similarly subdued in April, forecasting 13 named storms, 6 hurricanes and 2 major hurricanes.

So this wasn’t a case of forecasters screaming about a monster hurricane season that never materialized.

They saw one of the biggest suppressing forces coming.

El Niño.

And by August, as the atmosphere became increasingly hostile, NOAA lowered its forecast again to 7 to 13 named storms and 2 to 6 hurricanes, with a 75% chance of a below-normal season.

That August update is important.

Because even after forecasters had seen nearly half the season unfold and lowered their expectations…

they still expected at least two hurricanes.

We’re sitting at zero.

So what changed?

Why couldn’t forecasters see this coming in spring?

Because spring is one of the hardest times of year to predict exactly what El Niño will become months later.

NOAA explicitly warned about this uncertainty in its May hurricane outlook. Spring forecasts of El Niño and La Niña have limited skill, as do predictions of some of the atmospheric ingredients that ultimately control hurricane activity months later.

Think of trying to predict the final score of a football game while the teams are still warming up.

You know the players. You know their history. You can identify some important advantages.

But the game hasn’t happened yet.

Forecasters knew El Niño was likely to interfere with Atlantic hurricanes.

What they couldn’t know precisely was just how powerful that interference would become.

And as summer unfolded, the answer started becoming pretty remarkable.

How did El Niño strangle the Atlantic?

It helped make the atmosphere above all that warm Atlantic water hostile to hurricanes.

One of a hurricane’s biggest enemies is vertical wind shear, which simply means winds change speed or direction as you move higher through the atmosphere.

El Niño typically increases wind shear across parts of the tropical Atlantic and Caribbean.

Imagine trying to build a tall tower of blocks while somebody keeps pushing the top sideways.

That’s essentially what wind shear can do to a developing tropical cyclone.

A tropical system needs its thunderstorms reasonably well stacked over its circulation. Strong shear can blow those thunderstorms away from the center, tilt the system and prevent it from organizing.

And that’s what makes 2026 so interesting.

The Atlantic wasn’t missing warm water.

It was missing a cooperative atmosphere.

Then El Niño kept strengthening.

Just how powerful did El Niño become?

Much more impressive than it looked when those first hurricane forecasts were issued.

By August, temperatures in the key Niño-3.4 region of the tropical Pacific had climbed to 1.8°C above average. Parts of the eastern equatorial Pacific were running more than 3°C above average.

Underneath the surface, NOAA found something even more striking: widespread areas where water temperatures were more than 10°C above average.

NOAA now says there’s a greater than 90% chance of a very strong El Niño this fall and winter.

And if you want to see El Niño’s fingerprints without looking at a complicated weather map, compare the Atlantic with the ocean next door.

What happened in the eastern Pacific?

Almost the opposite.

As of September 24:

Atlantic:

6 named storms

0 hurricanes

0 major hurricanes

ACE 6.6

92% below normal

Meanwhile, the eastern Pacific had produced:

16 named storms

6 hurricanes

3 major hurricanes

ACE 127

47% above normal

Put the two oceans side by side and 2026 almost looks broken.

One basin is struggling to make hurricanes at all.

The other has been considerably more active than normal.

Same tropics. Same year. Completely different hurricane seasons.

El Niño is a big reason why.

But that raises an uncomfortable question.

If forecasters knew El Niño was coming, doesn’t missing by this much mean the forecast failed?

Does this mean the 2026 hurricane forecast failed?

So far, the numbers are well below even NOAA’s lowered August hurricane forecast. But that doesn’t mean the science behind the forecast was useless.

Seasonal outlooks are predictions of probabilities, not promises.

And the forecasts did identify something meaningful months ahead of time: El Niño favored a below-normal Atlantic hurricane season.

What they didn’t predict was the magnitude of the suppression.

Think of a seasonal forecast like looking at a deck of cards and estimating which hands are most likely to appear.

You can know one hand is considerably more likely than another.

You still don’t know exactly which cards will be dealt.

In 2026, Mother Nature appears to have dealt a hand sitting way out toward the edge of expectations.

But there’s another reason we shouldn’t perform the final autopsy quite yet.

Could the hurricane forecast still recover?

Yes. Hurricane season isn’t over until November 30.

And this is where the word “so far” becomes important.

The Atlantic needs only one hurricane to erase that giant zero. Several late-season storms could also push the named-storm total into NOAA’s August range of 7 to 13.

But getting the hurricane count into that forecast range requires more work.

NOAA’s August outlook called for at least two hurricanes and seasonal ACE reaching 30% to 90% of the historical median.

So the Atlantic still has time to make the final statistics look considerably less bizarre than they do today.

It just has increasingly less time to do it.

And that makes every additional quiet week part of the story.

If the season does finish far below the forecast, scientists won’t simply shrug and move on.

They’ll take it apart.

What can scientists learn if the forecast really was a bust?

An extreme miss can become an extremely useful test of the models that produced it.

Researchers can go back and ask which models handled El Niño’s strengthening best.

Which underestimated its influence on Atlantic wind shear?

Were other atmospheric patterns helping suppress storms?

Were there signals sitting in the spring data that become obvious only when you know what happened afterward?

Those aren’t excuses for a forecast that missed.

They’re how the next forecast gets better.

Weather models improve because scientists can compare what they predicted with what the atmosphere actually did. An unusual season can be especially valuable because it exposes weaknesses an ordinary year might never reveal.

That’s why a forecast bust doesn’t disappear.

It becomes data.

And the final verdict on 2026 hasn’t been written yet.

The Atlantic could wake up in October. We could get hurricanes. The final numbers could crawl closer to the bottom of NOAA’s forecast ranges.

Or we could reach November 30, look back at those six early names and realize we really did witness one of the strangest hurricane seasons in the historical record.

Either way, next spring scientists will feed another ocean of observations into their models and issue another hurricane forecast.

There will be new numbers.

New probabilities.

New arguments about whether the Atlantic will be busy or quiet.

And somewhere inside the science behind those forecasts will be a little bit of 2026.

A season that reminded us of something wonderfully humbling about predicting weather:

Sometimes you can correctly see what’s coming and still be astonished by what actually happens.

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