This report is an analysis on hurricanes, surprisingly I am not seeing the explosive growth that documentaries show. I took the raw list of hurricanes from wikipedia to make landfall in US 1850-2018 and did an analysis.
This is a “strength” study. Each hurricane gets points which is the square of its category, so cat 5 = 25 points, cat 2 = 4 points. It’s an annual study where we sum up the points of all hurricanes happening within one calendar year.
There is no clear pattern of exponential growth in strength. In fact in 2005 strength appears to be all time low. This is the same study by decade where we sum up the points of all hurricanes happening in 10 year periods.
You may think the exponential scoring is unfair, so we can try a linear. Here, the points assigned to each hurricane is equal to its category. So two cat 3 hurricanes in one year = 6 points.
This is a color coded study showing counts by hurricane category. Here I added a polynomial trend line. Over 200 years see a linear increase, but this could be attributed to missing data in the 1800s. Did locals on Barbuda have a telegram to tell mainland about a category 4 hurricane that passed over and wiped everything off the map? Unluckily. Today everything is documented from space and NOAA airplanes.
Again you can see in the 1980s there was an increase in # of category 2, (red), but we see the same back 1920s.
Above we show just category 3-5, we can see in 2010+ there are more category 4 than ever before, but there are far fewer cat 3 and no cat 5, and the 10 years prior had a record low, so not clear if there’s any pattern of intensification here.
Next up is an absolute count of hurricanes in north Atlantic (these typically pass through Caribbean). By pure count, we do see an upward trend. I added a 5 year trend line.
Again, I do wonder how accurate record keeping is from 1800s. The Caribbean and US had inhabitants and they could measure wind and send telegrams but did they really capture as much data as we get today? Pretty unlikely.
This graph covers just the more recent 1980-2018 time period, again, doesn’t look like a trend showing exponential growth.
Data Sources: I grabbed data from Wikipedia Hurricane Data and Hurricane Atlantic Data. and cleaned it up for analysis
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