Atlantic hurricane reanalysis project

The Atlantic hurricane reanalysis project of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration seeks to correct and add new information about past North Atlantic hurricanes. It was started around 2000 to update HURDAT, the official hurricane database for the Atlantic Basin, which has become outdated since its creation due to various systematic errors introduced into the database over time. This effort has involved reanalyses of ship observations from the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS) as well as reanalyses done by other researchers over the years. It has been ongoing as of 2016, and should last another four years.

HURDAT contains a number of errors which need to be corrected, such demonstrated by the outliers in the a pressure vs. wind speed graph of datapoints in the database (right). Some of these errors have existed since the database's creation during NASA's Apollo Program, where it was used to help produce probabilities of tropical cyclone-induced winds in critical areas such as Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral).

A significant amount of new data for systems between 1851 and 1886 became available after a major basin-wide reanalysis in 1996, a project led by Jose Fernandez-Paratagas with the collaboration of Henry Diaz. The new data was constructed using old newspaper articles and the hemispheric weather map series. Hurricane histories for individual states had been constructed by the 1990s as well, which proposed new storms and increased the knowledge of tropical cyclones already in the database. Due to this profusion of relevant information not included in HURDAT, and evolving definitions for tropical and subtropical cyclones over the decades, the project was started around 2000 to update the official database. Since then, the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set has been utilized to check for older ship reports which were either not utilized nor available to previous researchers.

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