Tropical Cyclones

Every hurricane, typhoon, and cyclone on TerraPulse is organized into the tc Eventdex — one slot per storm, each a running dossier of where that storm actually went and how strong it actually was. The tracks are best-track and observed fixes: measured position and intensity, not a forecast cone or a model reconstruction. No estimates of what a storm might do — only the record of what it did.

The dex

One Eventdex holds the whole global record. Each slot is a single named storm; as new fixes arrive they accrete onto that storm’s own time-series, so a slot is a track — dozens to hundreds of observed points — not a single row. The count is live and grows as new storms spin up:

That is about 13,500 storms across every hurricane basin on Earth, the record reaching back to 1842 and updating as active systems are tracked. Coverage is complete and reliable from the satellite era (roughly the 1970s on); earlier decades are real but thinner, so TerraPulse uses this dex for questions about timing and geography, not for counting trends over the full record.

Provenance

Two measured sources feed one continuous series:

• IBTrACS — the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship, maintained by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. It stitches together the finalized best-track records of every regional warning center into a single global history of observed storm positions and intensities.
• NHC — the U.S. National Hurricane Center’s live storm feed supplies observed fixes on active systems, updated through the storm, before they are folded into the finalized best-track record.

Both are registered against the tc dex, so a storm’s live edge and its finalized history form one traceable series — every fix carries a direct line back to the warning center that recorded it.

What’s in a record

Each storm slot carries, for every observed fix along the track:

• Position — latitude and longitude
• Time — observation time, UTC
• Intensity — maximum sustained wind, in knots
• Pressure — central pressure, in millibars
• Category — Saffir–Simpson scale, where classified
• Motion — storm forward speed and heading
• Identity — storm id, name, basin, and season

Recent storms also carry a companion sensor sweep — the real instrument readings (tide gauges, lightning, radiosondes) that fell within about 500 km and ±6 hours of the storm’s track. That layer is deep for recent seasons and thin historically, where most tracks cross open ocean.

Explored in

• It’s Always Hurricane Season Somewhere — the global season-phase monitor: hemispheres run about five months out of phase, and no month on record is ever quiet everywhere at once.