Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.

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The Atlantic hurricane season is living up to its low expectations.

So far, Hurricane Bill has been the lone significant storm. It peaked at Category 4, but was deflected away from the United States by the persistent southward-dipping jet stream.

The last two efforts were given more promise on computer forecast models than they bore out in the atmosphere.

Tropical Storm Danny got absorbed into a cold front and low pressure system moving off the East Coast, while shearing winds aloft simply took Tropical Storm Erika apart in the eastern Caribbean.

Atlantic tropical seasons that are concurrent with El Nino, the periodic warming of central Pacific sea surface temperatures now ongoing, generally produce fewer and weaker tropical systems than average in the Atlantic.

Still, new waves move off Africa every few days, each with potential to develop into a significant hurricane if one can find a patch of hot sea surface temperatures and light winds aloft. Other systems, like disturbances in the Caribbean or stalled cold fronts across the Gulf of Mexico, can spin up into tropical storms quickly given the right conditions.

With high pressure building over the northern U.S. the next several days, a period of time is upcoming when an Atlantic tropical system could get pulled into the United States by the high's clockwise wind flow. But with each passing day, the odds improve of this season being a hurricane no-hitter for the American coastlines.

Weather Journal appears on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.