The Madden-Julian Oscillation - like the better known El Niño Southern Oscillation - is a climate phenomenon. It describes the eastward moving disturbance of clouds, rain, winds, and pressure, that traverses the planet in the tropics and returns to its start point in 30 to 60 days.

Meteorologists are trying to figure out how this year's hurricane season went from historically wild to unnaturally quiet in a month's time.

I haven’t seen a year where the conditions were so conducive flopping so miserably," a top CSU researcher who studies hurricanes and climate said. So what's going on? Here's the explanation from officials and what we can expect for the rest of the season.