This presentation reports on the final stage of the project to re-analyze the North Atlantic hurricane database (or HURDAT). The original database of six-hourly positions and intensities were put together in the 1960s in support of the Apollo space program to help provide statistical track forecast guidance. In the intervening years, this database - which is now freely and easily accessible on the Internet from the National Hurricane Center's (NHC's) Webpage - has been utilized for a wide variety of uses: climatic change studies, seasonal forecasting, risk assessment for county emergency managers, analysis of potential losses for insurance and business interests, intensity forecasting techniques and verification of official and various model predictions of track and intensity. Unfortunately, HURDAT was not designed with all of these uses in mind when it was first put together and not all of them may be appropriate given its original motivation. One limitation of HURDAT is that there are numerous systematic as sell as some random errors in the database which need correction. Additionally, analysis techniques have changed over the years at NHC as our understanding of tropical cyclones has developed, leading to biases in the historical database that have not been addressed. Another difficulty in applying the hurricane database to studies concerned with landfalling events is the lack exact location, time and intensity at hurricane landfall. Finally, recent efforts into uncovering undocumented historical hurricanes in the late 1800s and early 1900s led by Jose Fernandez-Partagas have greatly increased our knowledge of these past events, which have not yet been incorporated into the HURDAT database.

Because of all of these issues, a re-analysis of the Atlantic hurricane database is been completed that extends the digital record back to 1851 and revises the hurricane database up through more recent years.

At the conference, an emphasis of discussion will be the history of landfalling hurricanes that have impacted the continental United States from 1851 to 2001. Details on how the database was constructed for the years 1851 to 1898 and altered for the years since will be provided. Variations in the tracks and intensities of Atlantic hurricanes over the long-term will be compared with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation of sea surface temperatures.