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How many hurricanes hit the US between 2006 and 2016? Are there more hurricanes in this decade then in the past?
Question Date: 2017-06-06
Answer 1:

From 2006-2016 (including 2016), there were 10 hurricanes that made landfall on the continental U.S. From 1997-2006 there were 21 hurricanes that made landfall. The amount of hurricanes from decade to decade can vary quite a bit.

In case you hadn't heard of it yet, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is a great source of information about weather. Their website has records going back to the mid 19th century of the names, times, and sizes of most hurricanes.


Answer 2:

I'm not able to find data on hurricanes hitting the United States, but I can get data for hurricanes in different ocean basins. Actually, I think you should look at the data yourself: here is a website you can use, courtesy of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration:

NOAA

This page is for 2016 on the Atlantic side of the U.S. You can click on the links at the top of the page for the different years.

Underneath that you can click on eastern Pacific to get the west coast side, although the Pacific off of California is so cold that hurricanes almost never make it far enough north to hit the U.S. on that side (they do hit Mexico, though).

I can tell you from glancing at the data myself that there isn't a clear pattern over 10 years that you can discern that would be due to climate change. Climate change generally takes place over longer time scales than that. If you looked at the hurricanes that have hit the U.S. from 1966 to 2016, so 50 years instead of just 10, you would probably see a trend, but not over just 10 years. I notice that the records on the websites that I gave you the links to go back to 1995, which gives you 21 years of data - you might see a trend over that, but it's questionable.

There is a lot of other cool stuff on that website, too, by the way. For example, this graph Atlantic Storm , might answer your question: you can see a slow and very uneven increase in the number of storms, but this is from 1850 all of the way to the present.

You can also see when in the year hurricanes tend to hit, what states they most often hit and with what intensity, and a good number of other things.


Answer 3:

According to NOAA's National Center for Environmental Information, a total of 163 hurricanes were recorded for the 2006 through 2016 seasons for both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans: 2006=16 hurricanes, 2007=10, 2008=15, 2009=10, 2010=9, 2011=17, 2012=20, 2013=9, 2014=20, 2015=17, 2016=18. Note that a storm season begins in June.

So the 2006 season includes all storms between June 1, 2016 through May 30, 2007. Hurricane, cyclone, and typhoon all mean the same weather phenomenon. A tropical storm or tropical cyclone is classified as a hurricane, cyclone, or typhoon, when it reaches sustained winds of 74 miles per hour or higher.

According to the National Environmental Education Foundation, citing numerous NOAA and NASA sources, the intensity, frequency, and duration of North Atlantic hurricanes has increased since the early 1980's. Hurricanes hitting North America from the Pacific seems to have remained relatively constant since the 1950's. Complete records only go back to the 1950's.

Cheers,


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