Since 1945, the number of hurricanes that make landfall has declined by about a third

Last week a paper published in Science concluded that worldwide, “To date, there has been no firm evidence of global trends of the frequency of tropical cyclones with maximum wind speed above the hurricane-force wind (64 knots) at landfall.” That finding, which confirms our work, was based on data since 1982. But what happens when we take a look further back in time? What we find might surprise you.

Since 2012, when we published the first comprehensive dataset of global landfalling hurricanes, we have updated the dataset annually (props to @RyanMaue for the heavy lifting).

Overall, 2020 was not an usually busy year on planet Earth for hurricanes. The figure below (via @RyanMaue) shows that 2020 had 44 total hurricanes, of which 21 reached major storm strength (technically, Category 3 or greater…