HURDAT

The National Hurricane Centers HURricane DATabases (HURDAT) are two separate databases that contain details on tropical cyclones, that have occurred within the Atlantic Ocean and Eastern Pacific Ocean since either 1851 or 1949.

The Eastern Pacific database was originally compiled at the NHC during 1976, to help with the initialization with two tropical cyclone forecast models. Initially tracks for the Central Pacific region and tracks for tropical depressions, that did not develop into tropical storms or hurricanes were not included within the database. Over the next few years tracks were archived best track data from the Eastern Pacific Hurricane Center (EPHC) were archived by the NHC on an annual basis. During 1982 the NHC started to include data on Central Pacific tropical storms and hurricanes within the database, before they took over the responsibility for issuing advisories during 1988. The format of the Eastern Pacific database was subsequently significantly changed during 2013 to include non-synoptic best track times and non-developing tropical depressions.

During 1959, a technical paper was published by the United States Weather Bureau, which consolidated several sources of records in to a single publication. These sources included annual summaries that had been published in the Monthly Weather Review at various times since 1922, unpublished materials from the Hurricane forecast offices and other studies on hurricanes and hurricane climatology back to around 1886. While combining the sources, position errors of over 100 miles (160 km) were found for several hurricanes shown in more than one source. Therefore, the positions of all of the systems that were considered to have tropical characteristics, were compared with the historical weather maps of the daily synoptic series. The most reliable positions and intensities were then plotted on a series of annual track charts, before being reviewed by the hurricane forecast centres, Extended Forecast Section and the National Hurricane Research Project. The most accurate and consistent locations from the reviews were then plotted on the maps and published. This dataset was subsequently updated during 1965, which extended the dataset back to 1871 and forwards to 1963 based on additional material.

...
Wikipedia