The names of the storms.
Humanity has been writing down its cyclones for centuries, and the world's weather agencies keep the ledger whole: 13,584 tropical storms since 1842, every one with its track, from the unnamed terrors of the sailing era to the lettered seasons of today. This report plays the whole archive on one map — the Atlantic's long curls, the Pacific's typhoon highway, the southern spirals — colored by the strength each storm reached and marked where it came ashore. The modern archive holds more storms not only because there are more, but because satellites finally see them all — the record's own growth is part of the story, and the method says so. Every figure is computed from the archive at render time.
published 2026-08-29 · data cutoff 2026 season in progress · edition 1 — updated only by a new dated edition · source: NOAA NCEI IBTrACS v04r01, all basins
A season at a time, every track.
Press play. Each season's storms draw their full paths, colored by the strongest category each reached — the grays never got a rating, the reds are the majors — with landfalling storms drawn solid and sea-bound storms faint. The card names the season's strongest. Tracks load a decade at a time as the player travels.
The count, and why it climbs.
Storms per season for 184 years — and the climb is mostly the watchers, not the weather. The sailing era logged what ships survived; the aircraft era logged what it flew into; the satellite era logs everything. This exhibit draws the count honestly and marks the observation eras, because a record that grows with its instruments must say so or it lies. The landfall line is steadier — coasts have always been where the record was surest.
Where every track comes from.
One archive, read whole. IBTrACS is NOAA's merge of every weather agency's best-track record — 726,241 six-hourly positions across 13,584 storms, all basins, 1842 to the season in progress. This page's records are that archive thinned for the wire (tracks decimated, coordinates rounded to a tenth of a degree) and shipped a decade at a time; the full-resolution archive is cited and public.
What is computed and what is refused. A storm's category is the maximum Saffir–Simpson rating an agency assigned; storms without one stay gray, never estimated from winds. Landfall is the record's own coastal-distance field. Deaths and damages are NOT in this archive and are not invented here — a casualty ledger would be a separate curated table with citations, and this edition does not carry one.
The record's eyesight, stated. The season counts climb with observation technology — aircraft from 1944, continuous satellites from 1979. The ledger view marks both eras; any trend read across them without that caveat is a trend in watching, not weather.