Hurricane

June is historically the least active month of the hurricane season, but that doesn’t mean the first month of the season can’t bring its fair share of issues.

Tropical Storm Arthur lasted only 12 hours as a named storm on Wednesday – one of the shortest-lived named storms in Atlantic basin records – but its stormy, water-logged remnants dragged a slug of torrential rains and severe weather through parts of the Deep South on Thursday, leading to widespread, devastating flooding from south and central Louisiana to southeastern Mississippi and lower Alabama.

Short-lived Tropical Storm Arthur – which formed late Wednesday morning along the middle Texas coast – moved inland near Galveston by Wednesday afternoon and lost its tropical designation by Wednesday evening as its circulation quickly unraveled.

The National Hurricane Center late Wednesday morning upgraded Potential Tropical Cyclone One to Tropical Storm Arthur, the first named storm of the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season.

A large tropical disturbance spinning inland over the mountains of northern Mexico – in part the remnants of once-Tropical Storm Cristina that crossed Central America late last week and now dubbed Invest 90L by the National Hurricane Center, the first Invest of the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season – is expected to briefly re-emerge over the coastal waters off Texas late Tuesday and Wednesday where odds are increasing it could make a brief run as the season’s first tropical storm.

A tropical disturbance that moved into northern Mexico over the weekend – partly the leftover spin of once-Tropical-Storm Cristina that crossed Central America from the eastern Pacific – will hitch a ride along an unusually strong and slow-moving cold front this week through the Deep South.

The disturbance that we began previewing in this newsletter over a week ago and that was first mentioned by NHC on Wednesday is now centered over the Bay of Campeche in the extreme southern Gulf.

On Wednesday, the team of hurricane experts at Colorado State University (CSU) issued their June forecast update for the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season, reducing their predictions from their earlier April outlook, and now calls for the lowest tropical activity seen across the basin since 2015.

A disturbance we first detailed in this newsletter a week ago is now being tagged by the National Hurricane for low development odds later this week in the southern reaches of the Gulf before moving inland over eastern Mexico late Saturday into Sunday.

Though El Niño is responsible for intensifying many extreme weather patterns associated with climate change – worsening extreme drought, heavy rainfall, and heatwaves globally – its impact on the Atlantic hurricane season is generally welcome news to those of us living along hurricane alley.

In newsletters last week, we previewed the possibility of an active eastern Pacific seeding an uptick in storminess across the western Caribbean or southern Gulf later this week.

The first full week of the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season will close without any named storms.

The opening volleys of the 2026 hurricane season have unsurprisingly come from the eastern Pacific so far, where Amanda – the basin’s first named storm – formed late yesterday morning, and two more systems are poised to develop into next week off the Pacific coast.

The Atlantic hurricane season usually doesn’t come roaring out of the gate, and, as we discussed in yesterday’s newsletter, June is historically the least active month of the season for the basin.

June is historically the least active month of the 6-month hurricane season.