Tropics could play role in Minnesota weather, amid El Niño year

The tropics could play an active role in the Minnesota forecast in a few days, something we saw a little bit earlier in the season with Marie bringing some very indirect rain.

We don’t often talk about hurricanes or tropical weather in Minnesota, but we do have some Hurricanes here. There are several University of Miami Hurricanes working in Minnesota that are now meteorologists. There’s Susie, Eric, myself and possibly a few more. Let me know if I missed you!

The tropics could play an active role in the Minnesota forecast in a few days, something we saw a little bit earlier in the season with Marie bringing some very indirect rain. Marie swung a limited amount of rain our way a few weeks ago. Now we are already at Polo, the 16th named storm of the season in the Pacific basin. Two more storms could soon make that number even higher. You might have seen a little bit about Polo in the news, because the storm is exceptionally intense off of the far southwestern coast of Mexico. As of late Saturday morning, Polo was still a Category 5 storm on the Saffir Simpson scale, with sustained winds of 160 mph.

Towards the top of this Updraft, you see this collection of lines that looks somewhat like the letter “C.” Those lines move back towards the Baja Peninsula of Mexico by the next 36 hours. That part of the storm is pretty tightly bunched, meaning there is not a ton of variation of tracks over the next little bit of time. We call this type of map a spaghetti plot — it looks a lot like a bowl of spaghetti and each line is the center of one storm’s path.

They’re all then collected together to give us a better estimate of where the storm will end up down the line. What you cannot see here is how many weather maps actually spin this remnant low moisture all the way up to Minnesota by Thursday. That is such an unusual direction, cutting through the Four Corners and moving basically straight northeast.

If and when Minnesota has seen tropical moisture, it’s usually a glancing blow from an Atlantic (eventually in the Gulf) that cuts through Texas. This will then just shave the southeast corner of Minnesota before veering into Wisconsin. But not in 2026. There’s been no Gulf moisture at all; in fact, there have only been seven storms overall. The nor’easter this weekend may have stronger winds than any Atlantic storm so far this season. The nor’easter is a cold core low, not a tropical low (so it won’t actually count as a tropical storm).

The campfire chart above shows us that we are now 2.5 weeks past the traditional peak of hurricane season. That is separate from the middle point. Hurricane season is June 1 through Nov. 30, so we’re much closer to the end of hurricane season on the calendar. So, why the quiet stretch? After all, we’ve demolished a record for the farthest into a hurricane season without having any hurricanes in the Atlantic.

You can blame El Niño and the wind shear it creates in the lower tropics. Shear is the twisting of wind direction with height (directional shear). Shear can also be faster winds at different wind levels (speed shear). Both types are vital for our storms over the continent. You need that shear to help very tall thunderstorms grow and move. Shear is like Kryptonite for warm core tropical systems. It rips them to shreds in hours. So, because we have had so much additional shear in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf, there have been a critically-low amount of strong storms — and zero hurricanes so far.