Four Days of Hurricane Facts and Info

If I've sounded quiet lately here on my blog, and on Twitter & Facebook, it's because I've been toiling away (for the last 4 business days) in the new AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center (launching next week probably), looking at our Facts, Stats & Information sections. We wrote this information in the early 2000's and hadn't really updated it since then. I wanted to give you a taste of what I've been working on. First, I'll be adding this map to our site, showing every storm and every hurricane worldwide from 1851 to 2007 (colored by intensity where known - only 1945-2007 for Indian, W. Pacific, S. Pacific), even Hurricane Catarina, the only known storm in the South Atlantic.

THE NEW SAFFIR-SIMPSON "WIND" SCALE: Did you know that the government's National Hurricane Center has replaced the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale with the Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale for 2009? It's true. This was done in part due to Hurricane Ike shoving massive storm surges inland well higher than typical with its Category 2 status last year. The pressure requirements were also removed; only the winds remain (they are at the same strengths for each Category). WikiPedia still has the details of the old SS Hurricane Scale and you can read NHC's announcement here.

HURRICANE PREPARATION: The web has come a long way since the days when we hand-wrote our information and there are many excellent government websites about hurricane preparation this year. For the most part I am just going to link to the National Hurricane Center Preparation Site - we could easily copy the information here but they are the official source of this stuff, and they may update it without notifying us (see the recent Tornado Car controversy, for example). If you haven't read my blog entry from last month about how 83% of coastal residents are unprepared, read on...

LIST OF ALL ATLANTIC CATEGORY 5 STORMS: We used to try to maintain this list on our Hurricane site, then later I maintained it on the WeatherMatrix site and finally on my blog, but this year I'm just pointing to the list on WikiPedia, which has the power of weather enthusiasts worldwide and will update quicker than any other source (same for Retired Hurricane Names). Did you know? There have only been 32 storms of Category 5 intensity in the Atlantic throughout recorded history (as noted by a Commenter below, one may not be able to trust data before the satellite era - 1950's), and 4 of those were in 2005. There were no Cat 5 storms in 2006 or 2008.