Miami ? The Atlantic hurricane season will be less active than originally predicted, government forecasters said Thursday after the first two months of the half-year stretch passed without any named storms developing.

Updating its May outlook, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said a warmer weather pattern called an El Niño over the Pacific Ocean was acting as a damper to tropical storms in the Caribbean and neighboring Atlantic.

But forecasters at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center in Washington warned people to remain vigilant because the peak period for hurricanes runs from this month through October. The overall season lasts from June through November.

The updated forecast calls for a below-normal to near-normal season with seven to 11 named tropical storms, down from a range of nine to 14 in the May forecast.

Three to six storms could become hurricanes, down from four to seven in the earlier forecast. The new projection says one or two hurricanes could become major storms, instead of one to three major hurricanes.