Tool For Playing With Atlantic Hurricane Data

I made a tool for playing with Atlantic tropical storm and hurricane data.

What you can do

• Filter by location - click the box select on the plot, and make a box; only hurricanes passing through that box will be shown
• Highlight a storm - click the pan on the plot; it will highlight the hurricane's path
• Filter by month - select the months you want to see
• Filter by year - select the years you want to see
• Filter by storm strength - select the hurricane categories you care about
• Filter by name - enter a storm's name to see all storms with that name

Double-click undoes any of the plot tools you have used.

What you can see

• Hurricane tracks matching your criteria like the image above
• Bar plot showing the annual distribution matching your criteria (by first point in track)
• Bar plot showing the monthly distribution matching your criteria (by first point in track)
• Table showing all storms matching your criteria

About the data

I used the HURDAT2 data. You can find a summary here or on wikipedia. There are unfortunately some gaps in the data. For one thing, hurricanes couldn't really be tracked well before reconnaissance planes were used. In the 1960's, we started having weather satellites to provide more modern tracking. Thus, the old data will have some gaps.

Further, the dataset does not report landfalls from 1960 - 1983. I filled in that information as best I could, but that does add uncertainty to the data in that period.

In summary...data since 1983 should be solid. Data since ~1940 should have reasonably accurate tracks. Before that point, storms were probably under-reported.