With November already on the horizon, the UK is yet to see its first named storm of the season.
Deep Atlantic lows, the systems responsible for more turbulent conditions, have been steered away by dominant areas of high pressure. This year the headlines have been about worsening drought rather than the impact of gales.
The mechanism is the jet stream. As autumn sets in and the nights get longer, temperatures around the polar regions start to fall, which creates a greater contrast with the warmer tropics and can fire up a more potent jet stream: the fast-moving, narrow band of winds high in the atmosphere that is largely responsible for developing and delivering stormier pressure systems.
Typically in autumn the jet stream would be a regular visitor to the skies above the UK, steering wet and windy weather towards it. So far this season it has often sat to the north or north-west instead, bringing south or south-westerly winds, warmer than normal conditions and more influence from high pressure, which has meant reduced rainfall for many.
The practical result has been only occasional bouts of stronger winds across the north-west of the UK, with little disruption. The heaviest rain has been focused on Scotland and Northern Ireland, while parts of England and Wales have continued to be much drier than normal.
Parts of Herefordshire, for instance, have received only a tenth of the rainfall they would normally have seen by mid-October. Exceptionally low reservoir levels across southern England have prompted the Environment Agency to declare "severe drought" in some areas.
That pattern is expected to break. A change in the position and strength of the jet stream is forecast through the coming week, allowing deeper low pressure systems to affect more parts of the UK, and BBC Weather's lead presenters said there is potential later in the week for the season's first spell of widely disruptive weather.
The longer-range signals point the same way. The Met Office's current three-month outlook, covering October, November and December, forecasts double the normal chance of wetter weather and 1.3 times the normal chance of windier weather, consistent with the patterns seen in previous El Niño events.
Storms are most often named when potentially damaging winds are forecast, but can also be named for flooding rain or disruptive snow. They were first named to help bring public attention to episodes of severe weather, so that people could prepare and plan ahead.
In Europe there are five storm-naming groups, created from the meteorological agencies based in a similar geographic location. The UK, Ireland and the Netherlands form the western group, which started naming storms in 2015, and systems are named by the Met Office, Met Éireann and KNMI based on expected weather impacts as well as on how likely those impacts are.
December, January and February typically produce the highest number of UK storms. Named storms are much less common in spring and early summer, and the only month with no named storms in the eleven years of UK naming is May. It is not unusual to still be waiting at this point in the autumn: in about half the years since 2015, the first storm arrived after 1 November.
It is worth being precise about what the season's figure measures. A storm becomes a named storm when three national agencies decide, on the basis of expected impacts and their likelihood, to name it. The count for this autumn is therefore not an observation of the atmosphere. It is a publication record, and the publishers have published nothing.
On that reading the UK has had no storms this season because none has been issued. The winds across the north-west were real but unaccredited. Herefordshire's missing nine-tenths of October rainfall stands as the clearest evidence yet of a storm successfully not named.
It also makes May remarkable. In eleven years of naming, May has never produced a named storm, which makes it the safest month in Britain, and the achievement belongs entirely to the three agencies that declined to name anything in it. The Department of Unnecessary Research has written to the western group asking it to confirm whether a depression that causes damage without being named has, for record purposes, happened.
The Met Office expects a windier end to the autumn. None of those storms exists yet.