Two Thirds Of Every Pacific Storm Comes Here

The Pacific Ocean makes more big storms than anywhere else on Earth.

66.2 out of every 100 of them come to us.

That is not bad luck. That is where the islands are.

Twenty-One A Year

Over the last 45 years, 957 storms came into our waters. About 21.27 a year.

The busiest year was 1985, with 28. The quietest was 2010, with 13.

80 of those 957 became a Category 5 — the strongest kind there is. That is about 1.78 every year.

But Most Of Them Are Not Typhoons

This surprised me.

54.44 out of every 100 storms that come here never get strong enough to be called a typhoon at all. They stay as depressions or tropical storms.

They still flood things. They just do not make the news.

Four Storms Are Tied For Worst

The record is 170 knots. That is 315 kilometres an hour of wind.

Four storms hit it: Haiyan, Meranti, Goni and Surigae.

Haiyan is the one we call Yolanda. 2013.

Three of those four happened in the last ten years. And 17 of the 25 strongest storms on record are from after the year 2000.

Now — I want to be careful here. That looks like storms are getting stronger. Some of that is probably real. But some of it is that our satellites got much better at measuring wind, and you find more strong storms when you can see them properly.

I cannot separate those two things with this data. So I am not going to pretend I can.

There Is No Safe Month

August is the worst month, with 17.29 out of every 100 storms. July through October together hold 63.25.

But here is the thing. February — the quietest month of the whole year — still had 12 storms across 45 years.

Most places with typhoons have a season. Then the season ends and everyone relaxes.

We do not get that.

What I Could Not Tell You

The old version of this page said 43.9 million people were affected and 4.2 million houses were damaged.

I deleted both numbers.

Not because they are wrong — I have no idea if they are wrong. Because the file I am using does not contain them.

What I have is a record of where every storm went and how strong it was. Positions, wind speeds, dates. 243,281 measurements going back to 1884.

It has nothing at all about damage. No deaths. No houses. No people.

Other people collect that — our own disaster agencies do. I did not read their reports, so I am not going to repeat numbers as if I had.

One More Thing About Old Data

The file starts in 1884. I only used data from 1980 onward. Here is why.

For every storm before 1945, the wind speed is missing. Every single one. Nobody was measuring.

So if I drew a chart of storms per year starting in 1884, it would climb steeply. And people would think storms are getting more common.

They would be looking at a chart of when we learned to see them.