US Extreme Weather and Climate Change Dashboard

Continental US hurricane landfalls, by Saffir-Simpson category, from NHC's HURDAT2 Atlantic best track. Unit: landfalls per year.

Category is the exact landfall fix's wind, not a storm's peak wind shortly before landfall (which can differ -- e.g. Ian 2022 peaked at Category 5 strength offshore but is Category 4 at the actual landfall fix, matching NHC's official classification). A storm making more than one continental US landfall (e.g. Katrina 2005, Irma 2017) is counted once per landfall. See the Methodology page.

Source: NHC HURDAT2 Atlantic best track

Computing trend…

Full-lifetime Accumulated Cyclone Energy of each CONUS-landfalling storm, attributed to its landfall year -- an intensity-integrated complement to a raw landfall count. Unit: ACE units (10⁴ kt²).

ACE units (10⁴ kt², standard NHC/CSU Accumulated Cyclone Energy). Each CONUS-landfalling storm's full lifetime track (all 00/06/12/18 UTC synoptic fixes, 34kt+, tropical/subtropical stages only) is summed once per storm and attributed to its landfall year -- not just the ACE accrued near the US coast. See the Methodology page.

Source: NHC HURDAT2 Atlantic best track

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Count of CONUS-landfalling storms that underwent rapid intensification (Kaplan & DeMaria 2003: wind increase of 30kt or more in 24 hours) at any point in their lifetime. Unit: storms per year.

Rapid intensification (RI): a maximum-sustained-wind increase of 30kt or more within any 24-hour period -- Kaplan & DeMaria (2003), Weather and Forecasting 18(6), 1093-1108; NHC's operational RI threshold. Counts landfalling storms that underwent RI at any point in their lifetime, not just near landfall. This variable needs a later reliable-trend start (1982) than landfall counts/ACE (1900): it depends on an accurate wind estimate at two points exactly 24h apart, far more exposed to sparse pre-aircraft-reconnaissance (pre-1944) and pre-satellite (pre-1966/79) intensity estimates than a landfall count is, following Bhatia et al. (2019, Nature Communications), which restricts its Atlantic 24-hour intensification-rate trend analysis to 1982-2009 for the same reason. See the Methodology page.

Source: NHC HURDAT2 Atlantic best track

Computing trend…

Peak (highest single reporting-station) storm-total rainfall for CONUS-landfalling tropical storms and hurricanes (a broader storm set than this page's other panels -- 34kt+, not hurricane-strength only, since rainfall isn't gated by wind). IPCC AR6/NCA5 have higher confidence in hurricane rainfall-rate increases than in frequency or intensity trends -- this panel lets that nuance be checked directly, the same way the flooding page's heavy-precipitation-extremes panel does for river flooding. Unit: inches.

This metric has an empirically derived reliable-trend window (1970), independent of the 1900 landfall-count/ACE window and the 1982 RI window -- derived from per-decade storm-rainfall-match coverage against the WPC sources, consistently 96%+ from 1970 on but dipping to 65-92% through the 1930s-1960s (a name-matching gap for early "Unnamed"/phonetic-alphabet-era storms, not necessarily a true absence of underlying data). See the Methodology page.

Source: NOAA WPC tropical cyclone rainfall (David Roth climatology)

Computing trend…