Methodology & Data Sources
Hurricane History is a historical reference for hurricane and tropical storm activity near U.S. coastal places. This page explains exactly how the site is built — where the data comes from, how we compute each place’s record, what we choose to index, and why nothing on this site is a forecast. The goal is a useful, honest answer with visible assumptions, not a black box.
Where the data comes from
Every storm on this site is drawn from NOAA’s HURDAT2 best-track database, the National Hurricane Center’s official public-domain record of every Atlantic and Northeast/Central Pacific tropical cyclone.
- Atlantic — 2,004 storms parsed, years of record 1851-2025. NOAA/NHC HURDAT2 best track, updated 2026-02-27 for the 2025 season. Public domain.
- Northeast/Central Pacific — 1,262 storms parsed, years of record 1949-2025. NOAA/NHC HURDAT2 best track, updated 2026-02-27 for the 2025 season. Public domain.
Place coordinates are resolved against the U.S. Census Bureau’s Gazetteer files. Each place in this guide is matched exactly against a live Gazetteer record — no coordinate is estimated or invented, and an unmatched place is skipped and logged, never defaulted. The current corpus is a curated shortlist of 119 well-known coastal places across the Gulf Coast, Atlantic Coast, Hawai’i, and Puerto Rico — not yet the full NOAA coastal-county roster.
How we compute a place’s record
For each place we walk every storm’s HURDAT2 track and find its closest approach to that place’s coordinates. A storm counts toward a place’s history when it passed within 75 km. The storm’s category for that place is its local maximum wind speed at closest approach — not necessarily the storm’s peak intensity elsewhere on its track. A storm that was a Category 4 at landfall 300 km away but had weakened to a tropical storm by the time it passed this place is counted as a tropical storm here.
By-decade and by-category counts, the strongest storm, the most recent storm, and the notable- storms list are all built from that same within-75-km set — nothing is added from outside it.
What we do not fabricate
This site presents only what HURDAT2 and the Gazetteer files support. We do not estimate damage, casualties, landfall status, or any figure not present in the source data. Where the record is thin, we say so rather than pad it with generic copy — see “What we index” below.
This is a historical record, not a forecast
Historical data only. No forecasts, storm predictions, or safety/evacuation guidance are provided or implied anywhere in this dataset. Historical return-interval figures (e.g. “a hurricane- strength storm on average every N years”) are computed as years of record divided by occurrence count — a plain historical average, not a probability or a prediction of a future storm. Nothing on this site is safety, evacuation, or insurance advice.
What we publish, and what we index
Every place with valid coordinates and a resolved state is built and reachable — every internal link (state hubs, nearby-place rails, search) resolves. A place is added to the sitemap and left indexable only when it clears our substantive-record floor: at least 3 storms within 75 km. A place below that floor stays live and linked but carries a noindex, follow signal and is left out of the sitemap, so we never send a thin page to Google just to have more pages indexed.
Today 119 of 119 places clear that floor — every place in the current wave has a substantive record. This is the same index-floor approach we use across our reference sites: quality-first, growing the indexed set only as real data is added, never templated mass.
Accuracy and uncertainty
Storm records before the mid-20th century undercount storms that stayed entirely at sea — aircraft reconnaissance began in the 1940s and systematic satellite coverage in 1966, so storms that struck populated coastline are the most reliably recorded part of the record. We show that caveat on every place page. If a record looks wrong or a place is missing, tell us at hello@hurricanehistory.co and we will check it against HURDAT2.
Planned enrichment
The current corpus is v1. Planned passes include expanding the place universe to the full NOAA coastal-county roster, adding wind-radii-based impact modeling (available in HURDAT2 from 2004 onward but unused in v1’s point-track proximity model), and landfall-specific fields — each widening the record without changing the historical-only, no-forecast rule above.
Licensing and attribution
The underlying storm facts come from NOAA HURDAT2 and place coordinates from the U.S. Census Bureau, both public domain. Map rendering uses OpenStreetMap data. Hurricane History is built and operated by Purcell Analytics. For more on the project, see About.