US Hurricane Landfalls Since 1851, Animated

About this chart

Each dot is one hurricane that made landfall on the continental United States, placed by its year across and its date up the calendar, January at the bottom and December at the top. Category 4 dots are ringed once and Category 5 dots twice, and the counts above the chart run as the years are drawn. A short tick marks a year with none. The animation draws the years in over thirty-eight seconds, holds on the latest year for two seconds, and loops. The scrubber pauses on any year, and the dots shown can be limited to the ringed ones and the speed changed in the controls.

Method

Each dot is one hurricane that made landfall on the continental United States, from the list of continental US hurricane landfalls kept by NOAA's Hurricane Research Division, which also gives each storm's Saffir-Simpson category at landfall. The dot's year is the year of landfall and its height in the calendar is the day of landfall in local standard time, from the Hurricane Research Division's detailed landfall list, checked against the landfall records in NOAA's HURDAT2 best-track database; for the storms of 1971 through 1982, which neither lists, the day is taken from the National Hurricane Center's published report on the storm. A storm that made more than one landfall is placed at its first. Hawaii, Puerto Rico and other territories are not included. Storms of the current season are added from National Hurricane Center reports and are preliminary until the year's records are final.

Data sources

Updated 2026 season to date

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