In brief: The Atlantic is in a very, very quiet place tropically, and that should mostly continue. There is some potential for an open Atlantic system out there in a week, which we discuss below.
It’s September 12, 2026, and for the hurricane season to date, in terms of accumulated cyclone energy (ACE), the Atlantic is running at 7 percent of normal to date. Not for the entire season, for the season so far. We’ve blown past 1915’s 2.53 ACE to sit at 4.4. So, as far as we know, it’s not the least active ever. But in the modern era, we’re not even close.
1983’s 17.4 ACE is the modern value that’s being challenged. One storm can blow this out, but at this point, we’re sitting rarefied air.
It is literally the opposite in the Eastern Pacific which is sitting at over 190 percent of normal activity to date. If the season ended today, it would be the 12th most active on record. Thus, we’ll be challenging some big years.
So where do we go from here? The next item to watch will be a potential disturbance in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, several hundred miles east of Bermuda in about 5 to 7 days. Models are somewhat mixed on exactly how things go here, but Google’s Deep Mind model is fairly aggressive in developing this one.
Obviously we can’t say a whole lot about this right now given the model dispersion of outcomes and the lack of a genuine disturbance to really track at this point. But it does appear that whatever this is won’t bother the Gulf or Caribbean. However, folks in Bermuda may want to keep tabs on this. Some of the model ensemble members do develop this one a little more aggressively than others. So perhaps this is a candidate for our first true textbook storm of the season. It’s not abnormal to see stronger storms in the higher latitudes of the Atlantic in El Nino summers. Let’s see where this goes.
Beyond that, there is next to nothing in modeling to zero in on over the next 2 weeks. Generally speaking, if something were to develop, it would probably have to be courtesy of a dying cold front in the Gulf of Mexico or off the Southeast coast. We don’t see any meaningful sign of that right now.
Enjoy the weekend!