2014/09/05 by Michael Chenoweth · 1 citation
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · #Tropical and Extratropical Cyclones Research #Climate variability and models #Ocean Waves and Remote Sensing #Tropical cyclone #Atlantic hurricane #Climatology #Landfall #Tropical cyclone scales #Storm #Extratropical cyclone #Cyclone (programming language) #Tropical cyclone forecast model #Environmental science #Tropical Atlantic #Oceanography #Geography #Meteorology #Sea surface temperature #Geology
paper · doi:10.1175/jcli-d-13-00771.1
openalex publication_date 2014/09/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Abstract A comprehensive new compilation of North Atlantic tropical cyclone activity for the years 1851–98 is presented and compared with the second-generation North Atlantic hurricane database (HURDAT2) for the same years. This new analysis is based on the retrieval of 9072 newspaper marine shipping news reports, 1260 original logbook records, 271 Maury abstract logs, 147 U.S. marine meteorological journals, and 34 Met Office (UKMO) logbooks. Records from throughout North America and the Caribbean region were used along with other primary and secondary references holding unique land and marine data. For the first time, North Atlantic daily weather maps for 1864/65, 1873, and 1881–98 were used in historical tropical cyclone research. Results for the years 1851–98 include the omission of 62 of the 361 HURDAT2 storms, and the further reduction resulting from the merging of storms to a total of 288 unique HURDAT2 tropical cyclones. The new compilation gave a total of 497 tropical cyclones in the 48-yr record, or an average of 10.4 storms per year compared to 6.0 per year in HURDAT2 less the author’s omissions. Of this total, 209 storms are completely new. A total of 90 hurricanes made landfall in the United States during this time. Seven new U.S. landfalling hurricanes are present in the new dataset but not in HURDAT2. Eight U.S. landfalling hurricanes in HURDAT2 are now considered to have only tropical storm impact or were actually extratropical at landfall. Across the North Atlantic, the number of category-4 hurricanes based on the Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale, compared with HURDAT2, increased from 11 to 25, 6 of which made U.S. landfall at category-4 level.