Hurricane Landfalls Continental United States

By Barry A. Klinger, October 2018
George Mason University, AOES Department
Questions and Comments: bklinger@gmu.edu
DC Area Weather and Climate

Hurricanes often hit states bordering the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. When has each state been hit, and by what hurricanes?

NOAA AOML has compiled a list of hurricane landfalls going back to the 1800s. This list includes the year and (for named storms) hurricane name, as well as each state struck by the storm and the maximum Saffir-Simpson category attained by the storm while it was in that state.

Here I use time-space plots to illustrate the information in the NOAA database. Each dot represents a hurricane. The horizontal location of the dot tells the year of the storm, the vertical location represents the state, and the color represents the intensity. This shows, at a glance, the times and locations of hurricane landfalls in the continental US. Click on figure captions for enlargements and more information.

[June 2019 note: Data for 2018 added from National Hurricane Center archives.]
[Shoutout to a student named Samantha for suggesting this Guide to Hurricane Preparedness]

Note that the database only includes states in which the hurricane made landfall. For example, Georgia would be listed if a storm came ashore there from the Atlantic, but not if it only crossed into Georgia from Alabama.

It is also important to note that many hurricanes have struck the Caribbean, including territories administered by the US. These are omitted here because they were not in the NOAA database. It would be interesting to make a similar figure for Caribbean islands, Central America, and Mexico.

Last modified: 9 June 2019