Bryan Norcross: We'll watch for storms developing close to the coast as hurricane season forecast gets reduced

Updated at 11:15 a.m. ET on Wednesday, July 8, 2026.

Colorado State University is out with their updated forecast for this hurricane season. Dr. Phil Klotzbach and the team are predicting even fewer storms than they were in April and June.

The new update calls for 9 named storms. We've already had one, of course — that barely-a-tropical-storm Arthur that caused tremendous flooding across the South. They're forecasting 4 of those storms to become hurricanes and only one reaching at least Category 3 strength.

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The numbers are significantly lower than earlier estimates, which were already below the 1991-2020 average.

The big factor involved is El Niño. In the spring, it was less certain when the phenomenon would kick in and how strong it would eventually become. Now the evidence is that El Niño is already impacting the atmosphere over the Caribbean and the tropical Atlantic, and it's coming on hard. Many computer forecasts predict it will reach record strength this fall.

Recall that we measure El Niño by comparing the temperature of the Pacific Ocean in a box along the equator south of Hawaii with the water temperature of the tropics around the Earth. Research has shown that extra warm ocean water in that elongated zone correlates with a shift in the weather pattern around the planet.

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The biggest impacts are in the winter, which can include significant rainfall in California and the Southwest. But in the summer and fall, the rising air over the superheated Pacific comes down over the Atlantic, which has the effect of suppressing tropical activity and generating hostile upper-level winds.

That doesn't mean that nothing will develop, of course. Sometimes you get a break in the forbidding pattern for a week or so, and a powerful storm quickly spins up. Houston's Hurricane Alicia and South Florida's Hurricane Andrew in 1983 and 1992 are prime examples. Although 1992 was not technically an El Niño year, the atmospheric pattern that season was generally hostile to development, left over from the El Niño in 1991.

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Because these windows of time when the atmosphere is conducive to development tend to be short, impactful storms, if they develop, most often organize fairly close to the coast. Alicia and Andrew are examples of storms that form and pounce.

Additionally, the ocean water in the subtropics is unusually warm this year. That's the band in the Atlantic offshore of North Florida and the Southeast. If a tropical disturbance reaches that area, it's going to have more energy than normal to work with. Again, we'd be talking about close-to-shore development. And development in the extra-warm Gulf is always a possibility, of course.

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The Colorado State team looks at a variety of computer models and schemes to come up with a forecast, and they also look at years in the past that seemed to have similar ocean and atmosphere patterns. On their list of analogs are 1965 and 2015, both years with strong El Niños. And both years produced a destructive hurricane.

The first billion-dollar disaster in U.S. history was Hurricane Betsy in 1965. After making a loop off Cape Canaveral, it moved south across Nassau in the Bahamas and the Upper Keys in South Florida. It was devastating across the Miami metropolitan area, with waves crashing into the lobbies of hotels along Miami Beach and power out for millions.

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Betsy moved on to New Orleans where it was Katrina before Katrina. In fact, the levees and flood walls that failed in Katrina were built as a result of the Betsy floods.

In 2015, Hurricane Joaquin formed well east of Florida. It was forecast to move north, and for a while, the Carolinas were threatened. Instead, it backed south and parked over the Central Bahamas before finally heading north into the open Atlantic. It was a devastating event for a number of islands, capped by the tragic loss of the U.S. cargo ship El Faro. The captain was relying on old forecasts made before the storm's surprise move to the south.

Nothing is expected to develop in the Atlantic, the Caribbean, or the Gulf for the foreseeable future, but it's important to remember the past. Indeed, El Niño seasons produce fewer storms, but sometimes weird and devastating things can still happen.