Typically by July we begin to get a better sense of the overall health of the Atlantic basin and how it’ll affect the peak months of the season in August, September and October. This July, the skies and seas of the Atlantic look beaten, bruised and battered, which bodes well for curtailing overall hurricane activity in the months ahead.
First off, the Main Development Region of the tropical Atlantic – where most our strongest hurricanes form during the season – just recorded its coolest June in 5 years.
The warmth of the eastern part of the Main Development Region – the band of waters between Africa and the Caribbean – is one of our most reliable predictors for seasonal hurricane activity. The cooler the waters, the lower tropical activity we should expect.
While waters here are still slightly above the 30-year average, the trend is down, and the easterly trade winds – prevailing winds that blow from Africa toward the Caribbean throughout the year – that help to regulate the Atlantic’s temperature are forecast to be much stronger than average through at least mid-July. The stronger east-to-west flowing winds mix up the Atlantic and cool it, so I don’t see the Atlantic rebounding to a warmer place as August approaches.
The other bellwether we look to in July for what the cards might hold for August and September is the amount of wind shear through the Caribbean Sea. While wind shear – the change in wind strength and direction with altitude – doesn’t tell us much in June, come July it tends to be one of our best predictors for future hurricane activity.
For June, shear was running well above average, but more importantly, the trend for above-average wind shear across the Caribbean is headed even higher for July courtesy of an increasingly strong El Nino in the eastern Pacific.
Higher wind shear suggests would-be storms will have a tougher time organizing, and it’s the Caribbean and western Atlantic that are most affected during El Niño years like this one.
Lastly, we look to global upper-air patterns to assess the health of the Atlantic basin. One of the telltale signs of a healthy Atlantic are global circulation patterns supporting rising air over the North Indian Ocean and sinking air over the eastern and central Pacific. This year, we have the exact opposite pattern, with impressive subsidence, or sinking air, centered squarely over the North Indian Ocean, and reams of rising air over the Pacific, indicating things just aren’t right in the Atlantic.
The upshot is the tropical Atlantic isn’t looking ripe for a big storm season. That of course doesn’t mean we can’t (and won’t) see strong hurricanes this year, but they’ll be fewer and have a much tougher time than in any year since at least 2015. We’ll be looking more to the subtropics – the region to the north of the traditional tropical belt that runs from Africa through the Caribbean – for activity this season than in seasons of the recent past. We’ll also not want to sleep on the Gulf, which is running well above average, for tropical seedlings that might slip through the shear-laced cracks this fall.
But for now, the Atlantic is fast asleep. The low pressure area we’ve been tracking off the Carolina coast is nothing but an innocuous low-level cloud swirl absent any thunderstorms, and development isn’t expected anywhere across the Atlantic basin for at least the first few weeks of July.
Copyright 2026 by WPLG Local10.com - All rights reserved.
