Global Hurricane Landfalls

The two definitions

One rule, two ideas of what counts as land

Both methods use the NHC glossary definition — the storm's surface center crossing a coastline — with a quarter-degree buffer for best-track position uncertainty, and both take landfall intensity as the greater of the landfall fix and the fix immediately before it, to catch a storm's strength before land-based weakening. They part company on two choices:

Weinkle et al. curated land to what matters for the economic-loss record their paper was built to check: continental coastlines plus the major storm-prone islands ( named landmasses — their Table 1). The site method keeps every landfall on any island above 50 km², so the Lesser Antilles, the Ryukyus, Bermuda, Fiji and their kin count. Neither is wrong; they answer different questions — "what threatens coastal economies" versus "what hits any inhabited coast".

Validation

Reproducing the 2012 numbers before extending them

Before the record is extended, the reproduction must hit their published Table 2 — computed here from a different land mask (Natural Earth 50m vs OSTIA), a later best-track vintage, and without their storm-by-storm visual verification:

Trends

The null that holds, and the category that needs care

By basin

Where the landfalls are

Method

Reproduction notes