Timeline plots of past hurricane seasons showing storm wind categories over time.
I wanted to make something like the hurricane season summary plots on Wikipedia (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2017_Atlantic_hurricane_season) but showing what category each storm was at any given time instead of just the maximum category reached.
As of 7 January 2019 I have made such plots for all Atlantic hurricane seasons from 1851 through 2017. The 2018 season has not yet been added to the dataset; the 2017 season was added on 1 May 2018 so I expect 2018 to be added at a similar time this year. I have not yet made plots for Pacific hurricane seasons.
I used the NOAA HURDAT2 dataset available at https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/. In the root directory are iPython notebooks to split the dataset into individual files for the storms, with a different directory for each season (these are in the "data" directory); to make the actual plots and save as pdf and png files (stored in "plots"); and to define retired storm names.
I have used Python 3.6 with packages:
numpy version 1.11.3
matplotlib version 2.0.0
pandas version 0.19.2
You are welcome to make use of and adapt the plots and source code as long as you acknowledge where they came from. I would also welcome any collaborators who want to expand this project.
Below are a few examples and a color legend. Hurricanes whose names were retired by the World Meteorological Organization because they were particularly destructive are shown in bold. The maximum category reached on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale is shown on the right y-axis. The colors are similar to those used in the tracking maps on Weather Underground, except for Category 5. I've tried other colormaps like sequential ones, which are arguably better for perception but it makes it more difficult to read off the categories.
