Tropical Storm Isaias Set to Be First Atlantic Hurricane of 2026 Season

Tropical Storm Isaias will become the basin’s first hurricane of the season, bringing life-threatening rain and storm surge to the Gulf Coast. Save this story Save this story The 2026 Atlantic hurricane season has been mercifully dull, but that’s set to change this week. Tropical Storm Isaias is forecast to become the season’s first hurricane before making landfall somewhere between Mississippi and Florida by the weekend.

El Niño has turned the Atlantic basin into a graveyard by changing winds high in the atmosphere so that they rip apart storms. That’s helped depress tropical cyclone activity to near-record-low levels and resulted in zero hurricanes. That could change imminently, though.

Isaias is churning in the Gulf of Mexico with winds of 65 mph, according to the latest update from the US National Hurricane Center. That’s just a shade below hurricane strength. The storm is forecast to pass over a patch of abnormally warm water, providing fuel for it to blossom into a hurricane.

It could peak as a Category 2 storm with winds of 110 mph as it lumbers to the northeast. The storm should weaken due to those aforementioned gnarly winds shortly before it makes landfall somewhere along the Gulf Coast. The NHC has issued hurricane watches for all the coastline in Mississippi and Alabama as well as parts of the Florida Panhandle.

(Tropical storm watches extend into Louisiana as well.) Folks in that region can expect rainfall totals of up to 7 inches, though some spots in the Panhandle could see as much as 10 inches and storm surge as high as 7 feet. Tornadoes aren’t out of the question either.

In other words, it’s a storm to take seriously. Isaias could make also (or at least tie) history as the latest first Atlantic hurricane to form on record.

The current record was set in 1905, when the season’s first hurricane formed on October 8. There’s still one more update scheduled for Isaias on Wednesday, so it’s possible it could just miss out on tying that mark.

Record or not, Isaias is indicative of the hurricane season that wasn’t. This year’s Atlantic hurricane season was forecast to be below average.

But it’s been even quieter than expected owing to an El Niño that’s been dubbed “ super,” “Godzilla,” and “ supersized.” The superlatives—which meteorologists will be quick to tell you are not official designations—are indicative of the strength of this year’s event. El Niño is measured by ocean temperatures in a part of the tropical Pacific, and this year’s iteration has seen record highs throughout the summer and first part of fall.

The intensity has had a heavy hand in rearranging the atmosphere around the world, including over the Atlantic. Saharan dust has also played a role in quieting things by making the air in one of the major areas where hurricanes develop too damn dry.

For a sense of how that has impacted the Atlantic hurricane season, we can look at some averages. From 1991 to 2020, the basin saw an average of 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes—that is, storms of Category 3 or greater—annually, according to NHC data.

This year has seen eight tropical storms and one soon-to-be hurricane. Another metric to measure the season is accumulated cyclone energy (ACE for short), which takes into account not just the number and intensity of storms but how long they stick around.

The ACE to date for 2026 is 10.8 units. The average for this time of year?

Nearly 102, according to data maintained by Colorado State University.