Eight named storms formed in the Atlantic basin through the end of September, and not one of them reached hurricane strength. NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information called it the latest point in a season without an Atlantic hurricane since 1966, the first year of the satellite era. Meteored’s reading of the same NOAA bulletin goes a step further, saying this is the first time since satellite observation began that the basin went without a hurricane before October.
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Four of the eight storms formed in September itself, which Meteored classes as a below-average month for the basin. A hurricane is a storm with sustained winds of 74 mph or more, and the strongest of the eight peaked below that line, so the season reached October with its hurricane column still at zero.
The records that fell in September
Through the first half of the month, the Atlantic was counting down to a record. A Sept. 3 report from WJHG noted that the satellite-era mark for the latest first hurricane was Sept. 11, shared by Gustav in 2002 and Humberto in 2013, and that the 2022 season’s first hurricane, Danielle, had formed on Sept. 2. A hurricane after Sept. 12 would set a new standard. AccuWeather meteorologist Jesse Ferrell confirmed in his running record that no hurricane had formed by Sept. 12, the latest date since satellite tracking began in 1966.
The 1966 start date is the key qualifier. Forecasters believe 1907 and 1914 also had no Atlantic hurricanes, but they caution that those pre-satellite records are incomplete because distant storms and ships could have been missed.
The closest the season came was Tropical Storm Edouard. According to a Sept. 15 season review, it came ashore near Johnson Bayou, Louisiana, on Sept. 1 with 60 mph winds, 14 mph short of hurricane strength, and later dropped more than 20 inches of rain in southeast Texas. Three of the season’s first five storms, which also included Arthur, Bertha, Cristobal and Dolly, formed in the northern Gulf.
El Niño shear and Saharan dust
Colorado State University’s Philip Klotzbach, a researcher in the university’s Tropical Meteorology Project, said that vertical wind shear across the western tropical Atlantic and Caribbean over the preceding 30 days was stronger than in any other year in the satellite record, which begins in 1979. He attributed it almost entirely to El Niño, calling the cause “almost 100% El Niño,” according to the same Sept. 15 review. Shear tears apart the vertical structure a storm needs to organize into a hurricane.
Other scientists described additional layers. Jhordanne Jones of Penn State pointed to Saharan dust arriving alongside El Niño’s suppression of rising air, a combination Jones termed “double suppression.” Benjamin Kirtman of the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School noted that this El Niño arrived unusually early and was already strengthening well before the most active months of the season began.
FOX Weather’s Bryan Norcross described the pattern in plain terms on Sept. 13: upper-level winds linked to El Niño were suppressing the rest of the tropical Atlantic and Caribbean, and the National Hurricane Center was watching a disorganized disturbance in the mid-Atlantic that posed no sign of a threat to the United States. “For now, it’s just something to keep an eye on, especially in Bermuda,” he wrote in his Sept. 13 analysis.
A forecast that kept moving toward quiet
NOAA saw this coming only gradually. Its May outlook gave a 55 percent chance of a below-normal Atlantic season, with 8 to 14 named storms and 3 to 6 hurricanes, and its August update raised the below-normal odds to 75 percent, as the same season review recounts. Eight named storms by the end of September already sits at the bottom of that named-storm range, so the unusual feature of the season is the absence of any hurricane, not a shortage of storms.
The contrast with the neighboring ocean is stark. In the September summary of NOAA’s global report, the eastern Pacific logged seven hurricanes, five of them major, in a month when the Atlantic logged none. The same El Niño that is stretching shear across the Atlantic is warming the eastern tropical Pacific, so one climate signal is feeding a record in one basin and a drought of hurricanes in the other. NOAA’s own national climate report states the Atlantic result as a key takeaway: eight named storms through September, none reaching hurricane strength.
The season is not over. Matt Rosencrans of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center cautioned that damaging storms can still occur in seasons that start this late, and the season runs through Nov. 30. The Oct. 13 U.S. Drought Monitor summary already refers to Hurricane Isaias, whose rain topped 12 inches in parts of the Florida Panhandle and southern Alabama, though that page does not say when the storm reached hurricane strength.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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