A Record Quiet Atlantic Does Not Mean a Calm Costa Rica

If you have been watching the hurricane season to decide whether this is a good month to be in Costa Rica, the headline number is genuinely remarkable, and easy to read the wrong way. As of yesterday, not a single hurricane had formed anywhere in the Atlantic all year. That is the latest the area has ever gone without one since satellites began tracking storms reliably in 1966. The previous record was September 11, shared by Gustav in 2002 and Humberto in 2013. Five tropical storms have formed this season. None of them reached hurricane strength. Edouard came closest on September 1. It was still gaining strength when it moved ashore near the Texas-Louisiana line, roughly 22 km/h (14 mph) short of hurricane force and coming ashore cut it off from the warm water it needed. The reason is El Niño, and the mechanism is simpler than it sounds. El Niño speeds up the winds high in the atmosphere blowing from the west, while near the surface the trade winds keep coming from the east. A storm needs its column stacked more or less straight up to organize and intensify. When the top gets pushed one way and the bottom the other, the whole thing pulls apart before it can get going. Rodrigo Castillo, a researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones Geofísicas at the Universidad de Costa Rica, explained that with El Niño strengthening, above-average wind shear over the Caribbean and tropical Atlantic is what you would expect. NOAA’s updated outlook for the 2026 season anticipated exactly that across the main development region for August, September and October. Phil Klotzbach, the hurricane researcher at Colorado State University, has described the shear in that region, the corridor running from Africa to the Caribbean where most Atlantic storms are born, as reaching record levels. Tropical Storm Dolly, the only system to form there all year, was torn apart within a day. Klotzbach has 2026 tracking as the least active Atlantic season since 1950. A thick layer of dry Saharan dust drifting across the ocean over the past week has made development harder still. Daniel Poleo, a meteorologist at the Instituto Meteorológico Nacional, said this is the lowest tropical cyclone activity at this stage of a season since the satellite era began, and that no tropical cyclone formation is expected in the Atlantic, the Caribbean or the Gulf over the following seven days. Here is the part that matters if you are actually in the country. A quiet Atlantic does not make your week drier, and it does not make it safer. Costa Rica sits south of the corridor where Atlantic hurricanes normally travel. The rain that floods roads here, swells rivers and cancels plans come from something else: tropical waves crossing the country every few days, and the band of convergence that parks over the region through the wet season. Neither of those shows up in a hurricane count. You saw both this weekend as tropical wave No. 43 crossed Saturday and today the IMN reported the atmosphere remained unstable, with storms forming off Limón and afternoon downpours across the Pacific. On Saturday around midday, a sudden surge of water swept six people downstream at a Guanacaste waterfall, killing an adult woman. No named storm was anywhere near Costa Rica. That is the practical lesson and that is to treat the hurricane forecast as background, not as a safety check. What puts people in danger here is a river rising fast while the sky directly overhead still looks clear, water that fell an hour earlier and kilometers upstream, arriving all at once. The record also does not mean the season is finished. More than half the activity in a typical Atlantic year normally arrives after September 10, and conditions can shift. One further record is within reach: reanalysis of the 1941 season places its first hurricane on September 21, and AccuWeather meteorologist Jesse Ferrell noted that if nothing forms before that date, 2026 surpasses that mark as well. The Pacific side of the region is telling a very different story. The eastern Pacific has produced 13 named storms, five hurricanes and three major hurricanes, close to a full normal season’s output while the Atlantic sits empty. El Niño is expected to reach its peak strength in November or December, which suggests the conditions suppressing Atlantic development will hold through what remains of the season.