Rankings
How the record fell
Reading a record
A record is a measurement, and measurements have eras
The book is the merged USA best track — HURDAT2 for the Atlantic and eastern Pacific, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center's record (via IBTrACS) everywhere else — because it is the only record that uses one wind definition, the 1-minute sustained wind, on every ocean. The regional centres that hold the official WMO books (JMA, IMD, Météo-France Réunion, the Australian Bureau, Fiji, Wellington) use 10-minute winds, which run roughly 12% lower for the same storm; their pressures, though, are the official WMO record, so pressure is ranked in both books.
Three cautions travel with every table:
Before the satellite. Rows badged PRE-SAT come from before routine geostationary coverage of that basin. Western Pacific winds of the 1950s–60s were inferred from reconnaissance pressures through wind–pressure relations now known to run high — Super Typhoon Nancy's 185 kt (1961) is the textbook case — while open-ocean storms elsewhere were often simply not seen at their peak. Pre-satellite records are real entries in the book, not measurements of the same quality.
After the aircraft. Routine western Pacific reconnaissance ended in August 1987. Every WPAC, Indian Ocean and southern-hemisphere intensity since is a satellite estimate — Dvorak by an analyst, later ADT-assisted — so a record there is a record of the technique as much as the storm. The Missing Intense Tropical Cyclones audit is the other side of that coin: storms the book holds too low.
Size needs radii. Power dissipation, IKE and gale radius come from the size layer, which has observed wind radii only from 1988 (Atlantic and eastern Pacific) and 2001 (elsewhere). Earlier storms carry the Xu et al. (2024) ERA5 reconstruction, badged RECON; rank them with that in mind, and prefer the "since 2000" view for size records.
Method
Rankings are computed from the per-storm archive that also drives the
season archive and the storm pages: peak wind, ACE, the V³
index, days at each intensity class and the largest 24-hour intensification over
synoptic (00/06/12/18 UTC) tropical or subtropical fixes; track length over every fix;
landfall wind at the coast from the Weinkle et al. (2012) land-mask crossing.
Pressures are the lowest tropical-fix value in the merged USA track and, separately, in
the WMO-designated agency's column of IBTrACS v04r01. Ties in peak wind are broken by
the lower pressure, then the earlier season. Southern-hemisphere seasons run July–June
and are labelled by the year they end. Alternate voices come from
the missing-intense audit — the climatlas satellite estimate
(trained on aircraft truth) and the ADT-HURSAT record re-mapped to the aircraft-era
Atlantic — and from the storm ledger: the Xu et al. ERA5
random forest, the strongest other agency converted toward 1-minute winds, and the
median of all voices. Everything is recomputed by
pipeline/records.py.
References
- Landsea, C. W. & Franklin, J. L. (2013). Atlantic hurricane database uncertainty and presentation of a new database format. Mon. Wea. Rev. 141, 3576–3592.
- Knapp, K. R., Kruk, M. C., Levinson, D. H., Diamond, H. J. & Neumann, C. J. (2010). The International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS). Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. 91, 363–376.
- Powell, M. D. & Reinhold, T. A. (2007). Tropical cyclone destructive potential by integrated kinetic energy. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. 88, 513–526.
- Emanuel, K. (2005). Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years. Nature 436, 686–688.
- Xu, Z., et al. (2024). Global tropical cyclone size and intensity reconstruction dataset for 1959–2022. Earth Syst. Sci. Data 16, 5753–5766.
- Weinkle, J., Maue, R. & Pielke, R. Jr. (2012). Historical global tropical cyclone landfalls. J. Climate 25, 4729–4735.