The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season is still about a month and a half away, and La Niña has yet to emerge, despite early forecasts predicting it will return by the end of summer.

That’s good news for the Gulf Coast and other storm-weary regions, according to forecaster Matthew Rosencrans of the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, as La Niña is associated with more tropical activity in the Atlantic Ocean.

“It doesn’t look like we’re going to have a really intense November at this point,” Rosencrans said.

In its latest Oct. 10 update on what is known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle, the Climate Prediction Center said the tropical Pacific continues to reflect the neutral conditions often seen in the transition period between El Niño and La Nina.

According to the Climate Prediction Center, La Niña still has about a 60% chance of returning sometime before the end of November, although forecasters expect that if such conditions do occur, they will be “weak” and not last long.

La Niña is the cool phase of the ENSO cycle, a pattern of alternating warmer and cooler surface waters in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Rising warm air in the tropics drives global atmospheric circulation, including the jet stream, storm tracks, and temperature and rainfall patterns.

La Niña tends to promote the formation and intensification of Atlantic hurricanes by reducing vertical wind shear over the Caribbean and tropical Atlantic Ocean. Wind shear can tear apart storms as soon as they start to form.

Before the start of the 2024 hurricane season on June 1, hurricane researchers and forecasters widely predicted that La Niña would return in full force after a near-record multi-year period of warmer water in the eastern Pacific Ocean, also known as El Niño.

The shift to La Niña was expected during peak hurricane season, historically between mid-August and early October. The Climate Prediction Center said in its spring outlook that La Nina had a 77% chance of showing up sometime in August, September or October, according to Rosencrans.

That, plus record warm temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, prompted alarming preseason predictions that predicted 2024 would be one of the most active hurricane seasons in history.

Instead, Rosencrans said neutral conditions have persisted and the chances of La Niña returning by the end of the season have diminished.

“In any case, we will probably end up at the lower end of our forecasts,” Rosencrans said. “We are certainly not going to continue at the fast pace we are at now.”

The reasons that neutral conditions have persisted are not simple, and there are numerous factors that influence the ENSO cycle, Rosencrans said, including both long-term climate patterns and short-term weather events. That can make it difficult to predict well in advance how ENSO will develop, he said, and ENSO forecasts before hurricane season have gained a reputation for being inaccurate.