The 2026 Atlantic hurricane season continues to make history in all the right ways.
The Atlantic hurricane season has never gone beyond September 11th in the reliable records (since at least 1950) without a hurricane. But with no credible storm contenders on the horizon at least into early next week, the 2026 hurricane season will easily set a new record for the latest-forming first hurricane.
Officially, NOAA is predicting 2 to 6 hurricanes this season and while it’s still more likely than not we’ll see a hurricane or two on the back side of the season – after all, we’ve never had a hurricane season in the reliable record come and go without any hurricanes (1907 and 1914 are the only seasons in the full record without any hurricanes, but that was before we had satellites or airplanes to detect lone open-ocean storms) – but if ever we were to take the under, this would probably be the year.
Overall seasonal activity as measured by the Accumulated Cyclone Energy, or ACE, is at a paltry 4.4 units (the average for September 11th is 60.5 ACE units), the lowest of any hurricane season to date in the modern record.
None of this is to say that we can’t or won’t see a week or two before the end of November where a big hurricane breaks through, but for the traditional height of the hurricane season, it doesn’t get any better than this.
Low development odds over the open subtropical Atlantic next week
Yesterday we mentioned a subtle signal in our longer range models of a possible system coming from the open subtropical Atlantic for the middle to later part of next week. The signal has become a little more pronounced today, especially in our AI camp of models (in both the Euro AI and Google DeepMind) but remains in the 10-30% range for next week.
If anything were to develop later next week, it’s most likely it would do so well east of Bermuda and is certainly nothing for us in the U.S. to be worried about.
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