This year has been extraordinary for so many reasons, not least of which for the extreme wildland fires that has occurred in the American West and the number of severe storms in the tropics throughout the world. These first three maps show the tracks and intensity of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, typhoons in the Pacific Ocean and cyclones in the Indian Ocean (those names are not interchangeable but the storms themselves are essentially identical). The points show the location of each storm at 6-hour intervals. The color represents the storm’s maximum sustained wind speeds as classified in the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, and the shape of the data points represent the type of the storm. [Source: Wikipedia] The second map shows the cumulative tracks of tropical storms from 1985 to 2005.
The maps are from Wikipedia and were created using WikiProject Tropical cyclones/Tracks. The background image is from NASA. The tracking data is from the National Hurricane Center’s Atlantic hurricane database