The Colorado State University Hurricane Forecast Team has issued its final forecast for the 2026 season, and Senior Research Scientist Phil Klotzbach says it’s unchanged from last month.
“I’m still forecasting a below-normal hurricane season with a total of nine named storms; of those nine, four becoming hurricanes and of those four, one becoming a major category three, four or five hurricane,” Klotzbach said.
Those nine named storms actually means seven additional storms, since they include tropical storms Arthur and Bertha, which have already made landfall in the U.S. Klotzbach says you can thank El Niño for the below-average hurricane season.
“When you have El Niño, which is a lot warmer than normal water in the central and eastern tropical Pacific, it tends to really ramp up levels of vertical wind shear, which is the change in wind speed and direction, with height in the atmosphere, in the Atlantic,” Klotzbach explained.
Klotzbach says the final forecast is well below what we see in a typical hurricane season.
“An average hurricane season has 14 storms, seven hurricanes and three majors,” Klotzbach noted.
Nine named storms would be the fewest in the Atlantic since 2014; four hurricanes would be the fewest since 2015, and the last time the Atlantic went through an entire hurricane season without a single major hurricane was 2013.