El Niño and hurricanes have a relationship that Florida homeowners hear about every few years and rarely see quantified. This is one of those years. As of early August 2026, the tropical Pacific is in moderate-to-strong El Niño conditions, and the seasonal forecasters at Colorado State University say they are "extremely confident" of a strong El Niño for the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season. Their August 5 forecast calls for 9 named storms, 4 hurricanes, and 1 major hurricane, well below the long-term averages, and NOAA's August 6 update says the same in its own terms: 7 to 13 named storms, 2 to 6 hurricanes, 0 to 2 major, with a 75 percent chance of a below-normal season. This summer's news coverage has a shorter name for the event, super El Niño, the popular label for an El Niño whose central Pacific waters run at least 2 °C above average for three consecutive months; this one crossed that line in July, ahead of the same point in 1982, 1991, 1997, and 2015. Neither NOAA nor Colorado State uses the term; they say strong, and so do we.
So what does that mean for Florida? The historical record gives a clear answer, and it comes with three cautions that matter more than the headline. This article lays out both: what El Niño has done to U.S. hurricane landfalls over 76 seasons, from our analysis of the NOAA hurricane record, and what it has not done, with the El Niño years that put hurricanes on the Florida coast anyway.
How El Niño changes the Atlantic hurricane season
El Niño is a warming of the equatorial Pacific, thousands of miles from the Atlantic, and its effect on hurricanes runs through the upper atmosphere. The warm Pacific strengthens the westerly winds high over the tropical Atlantic, which increases vertical wind shear, the change in wind speed and direction with height that tears developing storms apart before they can organize. It also tends to weaken the subtropical high that steers Atlantic storms westward, so a larger share of the storms that do form curve harmlessly out to sea. La Niña, the cool phase, does the reverse. William Gray of Colorado State University established the connection in 1984, and it has been the backbone of seasonal hurricane forecasting ever since.
The National Weather Service issued the El Niño advisory on June 11 and, with the phrase already in the news, explained what a "super El Niño" is and is not:
National Weather Service @NWS·Follow
An El Niño Advisory has been issued and you may have recently heard the term "Super El Niño". One of our meteorologists explains the terms NOAA uses to describe ENSO intensity and some basics of what El Niño is and is not.
The forecast calls for El Niño to strengthen into the winter months. See the advisory: cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analy…
More at noaa.gov/news-release/e…
That is why CSU's 2026 numbers look the way they do. Their August update expects the powerful El Niño to be "the dominant factor for the upcoming hurricane season, driving very high levels of tropical Atlantic vertical wind shear."
Shear is also where CSU added a new guidance tool this year. Alongside the statistical models it averages into its numbers, the July and August reports each print a map from an AI climate emulator, ACE2 from the Allen Institute for AI, run 51 times with ECMWF's ensemble of ocean-temperature forecasts to show where September's shear should sit. The model and its inputs are public, so we ran it ourselves: every one of our 51 runs puts September shear over the main development region well above the 1991-to-2020 average, in the same direction as CSU's map and as ECMWF's own seasonal model on the same ocean forecasts, with an average well beyond any September in the past 35 years; July and the first half of August have already run at record levels, so the direction is well supported and the exact size is the thing to watch. The maps below show the two models; our research note has the full comparison, the spread across the 51 runs, and what neither model tells you, which is anything about landfall.
| Forecast parameter | 1991-2020 average | CSU forecast, August 5, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Named storms | 14.4 | 9 (including Arthur and Bertha, already formed) |
| Hurricanes | 7.2 | 4 |
| Major hurricanes (Category 3+) | 3.2 | 1 |
| Accumulated Cyclone Energy | 123 | 50, about 40 percent of average |
| Chance of at least one major hurricane landfall on the U.S. coast, rest of season | 43% (1880-2020) | 16% |
| Chance of at least one major hurricane landfall on the East Coast including peninsular Florida | 21% | 7% |
| Chance of at least one major hurricane landfall on the Gulf Coast, Panhandle to Texas | 27% | 9% |
Those are real reductions, and CSU has a long verified record with this kind of forecast. Read them for what they are, though: odds for a whole coastline, computed from the same historical rates we discuss below, scaled down for the season. They are not a forecast for your town, and CSU's own report says so in its first paragraph: "it only takes one hurricane making landfall to make it an active season. Thorough preparations should be made every season, regardless of predicted activity."
El Niño vs. La Niña: U.S. hurricane landfalls since 1950
The forecast is about the whole Atlantic basin. What a homeowner actually cares about is landfalls, and for that the historical record is the right tool. We sorted every hurricane season since 1950 by ENSO phase, using the Relative Oceanic Niño Index that NOAA's Climate Prediction Center adopted for official ENSO monitoring in February 2026 and each season's August-to-October value, the peak of the hurricane season. That gives 20 El Niño seasons, 20 La Niña seasons, and 36 neutral ones. Then we counted hurricane-strength landfalls on the U.S. coast in each.
| ENSO phase | Seasons | U.S. hurricane landfalls | Per season | Seasons with at least one | Seasons with two or more |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| El Niño | 20 | 20 | 1.0 | 65% | 15% |
| Neutral | 36 | 56 | 1.6 | 75% | 44% |
| La Niña | 20 | 40 | 2.0 | 85% | 55% |
La Niña seasons have brought exactly twice the hurricane landfalls of El Niño seasons, and the chance of a season with two or more U.S. hurricane landfalls falls from 55 percent to 15 percent. That doubling is not a fluke of the sample: its 95 percent confidence interval runs from about 1.1 to 3.6, and it reproduces a result first published in 1998 by Bove and colleagues, who found 1.04, 1.61, and 2.23 landfalls per season on 1900-1997 with a different index. Two indices, two periods, the same structure. Klotzbach's 2011 study and Smith and colleagues' 2007 regional analysis find the same thing with more detail: the El Niño reduction is largest for the Florida peninsula and the East Coast, smallest for the Gulf.
If you take one number from this article, take this one: the historical base rate for an El Niño season is about one hurricane-strength U.S. landfall, half the La Niña rate. That is the good news, and it is real.
What El Niño does not mean
Here are the three cautions, and each one has a Florida storm attached to it.
Fewer is not none. Thirteen of the 20 El Niño seasons since 1950 still had at least one hurricane-strength U.S. landfall, and six of the twenty put a hurricane on the Florida coast: 1953 (Florence on the Panhandle and Hazel in southwest Florida), 1965 (Betsy across the Upper Keys as a Category 3), 1972 (Agnes on the Panhandle), 1987 (Floyd through the Keys), 2004, and 2023. The last two deserve a closer look. 2004 was an El Niño season on the index we use, and it brought Charley, Frances, and Jeanne ashore in Florida within 44 days, plus Ivan on the Alabama line. 2023 was an El Niño season, and it brought Idalia to the Big Bend as a major hurricane, the strongest to hit that coast in more than a century. Among the five strongest El Niño seasons on our index (1965, 1972, 1982, 1997, and 2015), two put a hurricane on Florida, one hit Louisiana, and two brought no U.S. hurricane landfall at all. Small numbers, but the lesson is not subtle: the seasons that look most like 2026 have gone both ways.
Hurricane Idalia
Aug 26 – Sep 8, 2023It changes how many, not where. It is tempting to think a strong El Niño protects one coast more than another. Along the U.S. coast the effect is a change in rate, not a relocation of the targets. The same three regions lead the landfall counts in every ENSO phase, south Florida, the Outer Banks, and the north-central Gulf, and what changes between phases is how many storms each receives. The reason is that El Niño's suppression acts mainly on the long-track storms that form in the deep tropics, the ones that tend to reach the East Coast and the Florida peninsula; storms born in the Gulf of Mexico and western Caribbean, which supply more than 40 percent of U.S. landfalls, show no detectable ENSO dependence at all. So a strong El Niño trims the odds for Florida's Atlantic coast more than for the Gulf, and it trims them everywhere. It does not zero them anywhere, and it does not move them.
It does not weaken the worst storm. El Niño lowers the number of storms that reach the coast. It says nothing about the strength of the one that does. Extreme-value analysis of landfalling wind speeds by Jagger and Elsner finds the rarest, most intense winds if anything more likely in El Niño years, not less. Betsy in 1965 was a Category 3 in the Keys and a Category 4 in Louisiana in one of the strongest El Niño seasons on record. Idalia came ashore at 115 mph in an El Niño year. A homeowner should read "El Niño halves the landfall rate" as true for frequency and silent on the worst case, and the worst case is what opening protection is for.
Where hurricanes have hit Florida in El Niño seasons
Because El Niño changes the count and not the map, the places that have led Florida's hurricane record in all seasons lead it in El Niño seasons too. Our study's maps by ENSO phase show south Florida and the Keys, the southwest coast, and the Panhandle in every phase; the panels differ in how many storms each phase supplied. El Niño's strongest concentration anywhere on the U.S. coast is three landfalls within 50 nautical miles of a point in twenty seasons, against five in La Niña seasons, and at those counts the differences between the maps are mostly sampling noise on top of a real but modest difference in rate.
For the long-run picture of where hurricanes have hit Florida and how often, our South Florida hurricane history has the numbers city by city, and the research page has the whole coast. The short version for this article: 28 hurricanes have passed within 50 nautical miles of Miami since 1900, and none since Wilma in 2005. That gap has nothing to do with El Niño, which reshuffles the odds each season, and it does not lower the odds for the next one.
What a below-average forecast means for a Florida homeowner
The right reading of 2026 is that the odds are lower than usual, not that the season is off. Every year the CSU report reminds coastal residents to prepare regardless of the forecast, and every year some people hear "quiet season" and skip it. Four suggestions from people who have watched El Niño years from inside a hurricane-protection business.
Keep the same plan. Your evacuation zone, your supply kit, your insurance review, and your window and door protection do not depend on the seasonal forecast. If a hurricane comes to your county this year, it will not be 40 percent of a hurricane.
Use the quiet. A season with fewer storms is the season to do the permanent work: openings, roof attachments, garage door, whatever the wind-mitigation inspection turned up. Crews, permits, and products are all easier to get when there is no storm on the map, and the My Safe Florida Home grant is easier to use when you are not competing with an entire county for the same contractors. Lead times run shorter too: impact windows and doors are made to order, and the factory queue that stretches to months after a landfall is at its shortest when nothing has hit. The 2004 season, an El Niño year, is the standing reminder of what the alternative looks like: three hurricanes on the peninsula in 44 days and plywood sold out across the state.
Watch the season's own signal, not the phase. ENSO sets the odds in August; the storms come from what actually forms in September and October. CSU now issues two-week forecasts through the peak of the season, and the National Hurricane Center is the source once anything is on the map. Also worth knowing: 2026's own ENSO classification is not final until the August-to-October value is in, and CPC's monthly ENSO discussion is where that gets settled. For the ocean side of the story, Tropical Tidbits' ocean analysis page keeps the current sea-surface-temperature charts in one place: the Niño regions, the Atlantic main development region and how warm it is relative to the rest of the tropics, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico. It is the quickest way to see whether the Pacific is still strengthening and whether the Atlantic is cooperating.
Do not reset your baseline. El Niño years are often followed by La Niña years, and the record says those bring twice the landfalls. The last season in our record, 2025, was a La Niña season. If 2026 passes without a Florida hurricane, the odds for 2027 do not carry it forward as credit. They start over, and the long-run number for South Florida is one season in six with a hurricane center within 50 nautical miles of Miami.
Next Steps
- Read the full ENSO analysis, including the phase-by-phase maps and the comparison with the 1998 study it updates, on our research page.
- Use the quiet season to find out what your openings are rated for. The My Safe Florida Home program can pay for the inspection and much of the work.
- If your windows and doors are not impact-rated or covered by rated shutters, request a free estimate now, while crews and products are available and no storm is on the map.
- Review what a Florida hurricane plan actually needs and update your kit before the September peak.
- If cost is the obstacle, financing options and the state grant together cover most projects.
