Every Atlantic Hurricane, Plotted

Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Landfalls

Every known tropical and subtropical cyclone landfall on record in the Atlantic Basin, from 1851 to the modern day. Landfalls are marked and assumed from the HURDAT2 database.

Use the panel to filter through the many categories. Hover over any dot for detailed landfall statistics and click a dot to trace that storm's full track. See something you like? Click the camera icon below the zoom slider to capture the map.

On coordinates: landfall positions are based on the official HURDAT2 best-track values. Prior to 1946, the HURDAT2 database did not mark landfalls for the entire Atlantic Basin, only just the U.S. As a result, landfalls prior to the 1940s have been inferred based on the six-hourly positions of storms in the database. With all landfalls (marked and unmarked), this database uses a 4-decimal coordinate approach rather than estimating to the nearest tenth (32.8791°N instead of HURDAT’S 32.9°N). This approach marks landfalls more accurately based on the HURDAT2 best-track, and snaps landfalls to a coastline for a better interactive map experience.

On damage/fatalities: these figures come from Tropical Cyclone Reports done by the National Hurricane Center. Prior to the 1980s, when data became increasingly inconsistent/sparse, local sources and databases were utilized to come up with figures. A smaller set of storms were never flagged as making landfall at all in HURDAT2, such as Hurricane David in 1979, and thus had to be manually reviewed. In this case, especially with older storms, other sources were utilized to recover true landfall damage/fatalities. Early/minor storms remain “Not well documented” where no source had reliable numbers.

On ENSO phase: classifications are NOAA's Oceanic Niño Index (ONI), based on each hurricane season's Aug–Oct SST anomaly. Reliable ONI data only goes back to 1950, so years before that are labeled “Unknown” rather than guessed.

On landfall time: HURDAT2 records every time in UTC. A built-in tooltip converts this to the local standard time of the landfall location (ex: Eastern, Central, Atlantic). This metric does not take daylight saving time into account, since DST rules have changed repeatedly over this database’s time. The UTC time is also shown alongside the local standard time for reference.

Showing 818 of 818 landfalls

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