HAMPTON ROADS, Va. (WAVY) — This hurricane season has been unusually quiet along the East Coast, but that doesn't mean you can let your guard down.

For much of this hurricane season, the Atlantic Ocean has been relatively quiet.

"I think it's been the most quiet since about 1914," said WAVY Chief Meteorologist Emeritus Don Slater.

We haven't had to deal with a major hurricane, and the Super Doppler 10 weather team says one of the biggest factors is El Niño. That weather pattern warms waters in the central and eastern Pacific [Ocean], and it can disrupt the normal setup for hurricanes in the Atlantic.

"El Niño is creating a lot of wind shear in the Atlantic basin," said WAVY Chief Meteorologist Jeff Edmondson. "That shear rips apart a big tropical system, so if that keeps up, the amount of hurricanes we'll see for the rest of the season will stay very low."

But low does not mean zero. The region is still in the heart of hurricane season, and history shows storms can make an impact well into the fall.

"We still have the rest of the month of September," Edmondson said. "We still have a huge chunk of October where storms can form, and that's when we've seen a lot of our storms here across the East Coast and in Hampton Roads — September and even October. You think back to 2012, we had Hurricane Sandy. That was around Halloween, so there's a long way to go for hurricane season, which ends Nov. 30."

Slater points to Hurricane Isabel as another reminder of how quicky things can change. Isabel became a Category 5 hurricane in 2003 before making landfall mid-September in North Carolina as a Category 2. Its impacts were felt here across Hampton Roads.

"There were parts of the area that were without power ... for a month, especially rural areas," Slater said, "and there were just tens of thousands of trees that were taken down. We had some heavy rain from a hurricane about a week or so before, and it didn't do a great deal of damage, that kind of thing."

But Slater said that earlier rain left the ground so wet, it made it easier for trees to come down. And then Isabel brought the water and the wind.

"You had these trees that were initially in mud, and now they're just in soup on the ground," Slater said. "So there was nothing that the roots could hold on [to] anymore. And boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, trees went down."

So while this season may be quiet, Slater said we should not assume that will be the new normal, because even as El Niño eventually fades, warmer ocean water could mean more fuel for future storms.

"Chances are that we're going to get more hurricanes," Slater said. "The hurricanes would be stronger ones, and bigger rain producers, too, so you end up with more wind and more rain out of any hurricanes."

For now, the threat may be lower, but hurricane season is not over.

"So you can't let your guard down because we got to keep an eye on what could maybe form," Edmondson said. "It only takes one storm to be a big deal."

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