Hurricane

We’ve written a lot about El Niño – the abnormal warming of waters across the eastern Pacific around the equator – in this newsletter this year. With it shaping up to be one of the strongest El Niños on record, we want to cover all angles of where we could see (and are already seeing) its fingerprints this hurricane season.

Tropical Storm Bertha’s four-day stint as a disorganized and largely unmemorable tropical cyclone came to an end late Thursday, as its circulation unraveled over eastern Texas.

The low-topped cloud swirl of Tropical Storm Bertha officially crossed the southeastern Louisiana coastline about 50 miles east of New Orleans in neighboring St. Bernard Parish Wednesday afternoon around 2 PM local time with maximum winds of 45 mph.

Bertha remained a weak, disorganized and lopsided tropical storm Wednesday morning, with its largely innocuous center swirl — absent any organized thunderstorms – sliding westward toward southeastern Louisiana.

NOAA Hurricane Hunters investigating Tropical Depression Two Monday evening, centered about 120 miles south of Panama City Beach, Florida, in the northeastern Gulf, found winds of 40 mph – the threshold for tropical storm strength – supporting its upgrade to Tropical Storm Bertha, the second named storm of the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season.

Tropical Depression Two, which formed Sunday morning over the northeastern Gulf about 150 miles west of Tampa, is expected to become Tropical Storm Bertha, the second named storm of the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season, later today.

Tropical Depression 2 is forecast strengthen into a tropical storm on Monday before threatening Florida’s Panhandle.

The National Hurricane Center continues to monitor an elongated corridor of low pressure stretching down the southeast U.S. coast and into the northeastern Gulf – with its south side tucked away in the elbow of Florida’s Big Bend – for possible tropical development starting this weekend into early next week.

The National Hurricane Center added two areas to watch to its tropical outlook map on Wednesday — one that we discussed in Wednesday morning’s newsletter over the northeastern Gulf to off the southeast U.S. — and another Wednesday afternoon in the far eastern Atlantic only a few hundred miles off Africa.

The area that we first mentioned in this newsletter on Monday and discussed in yesterday’s newsletter was added to the National Hurricane Center’s tropical weather outlook Wednesday morning.

It’s been a very quiet first half of July across the Atlantic, as we previewed it would be back on July 1.

In most hurricane seasons, we watch for the storms that form in the Atlantic’s main development region, or MDR, the primary hurricane belt stretching from Africa through the Caribbean south of 20 degrees north latitude, where most of our strongest and longest-lived hurricanes form.

It’s been a largely snoozy start to the Atlantic hurricane season, and that doesn’t look to change anytime soon.

The biggest dust outbreak of the year is trying to make up for lost time, with the first round of dust reaching the sands of South Florida yesterday and even thicker dust reinforcements moving over Florida and into the Gulf by this weekend, settling over coastal Texas by the early to middle part of next week.

Hurricane experts at Colorado State University (CSU) – the team that pioneered seasonal hurricane outlooks back in the 1980s – issued their July update Wednesday morning, revising earlier predictions for the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season downward for a second time since their initial forecast in April.