The Atlantic Hurricane Season: 120 Years

Thu, 08 Oct 2020

2020, Data Visualization, Hurricane Delta, Hurricanes

The following plot shows the number of tropical storms and major hurricanes occurring during each of the past 120 Atlantic hurricane seasons.

Figure 1: Number of Hurricanes and Tropical Storms by Year

As can be seen, the largest number of tropical storms occurs in the year 2005, the year of Hurricane Katrina. The 2005 hurricane season also holds records for the most number of several other types of storms, including category 5 hurricanes, and the most number of retired hurricane names. However, note that the final data point is preliminary at the time of this post as the 2020 hurricane season is still underway.

Update: December 16th, 2020

With the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season now concluded, the above charts are run again. Figure 2 shows the updated plot with the data as of December 2020.

Figure 2: Updated Number of Hurricanes and Tropical Storms by Year

With the updated data, the number of tropical storms in 2020 now surpasses the number in 2005. In fact, 2020 is now the most active season on record in terms of the number of tropical and named storms.

Note: The data in this post was collected from Wikipedia.