How Hurricanes Were Monitored in 1933

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SUMMARY

The monitoring of hurricanes in 1933 was significantly less comprehensive than today, lacking satellite technology. Historical records relied on ship logs and ground station reports, which were often incomplete or duplicated. This led to uncertainty regarding the total number of storms, as many hurricanes could have gone unnoticed, especially those that did not make landfall. The discussion highlights the limitations of 1933 hurricane tracking compared to modern satellite monitoring, which ensures that no storm is overlooked.

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  • Knowledge of hurricane classification and tracking methods
  • Awareness of the limitations of early 20th-century data collection
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  • Study the historical records of the 1933 Atlantic hurricane season
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matthyaouw
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I'm hearing a lot that this Atlantic hurricane season has broken records set in 1933 for most storms. How comprehensively were hurricanes monitored in 1933? It occurs to me that several storms this year were short lived and never made landfall (see here: http://hurricane.terrapin.com/CurrentSeason.html.en ) and this has got me wondering- with how much certainty do we know how many hurricanes/storms there were in 1933 (we obviously were not monitoring them by satellite)? I've been unable to find any information on how they were tracked back then, so is it at all possible that one could have just gone un noticed, or at least not reported by ship/plane crews?
 
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Nail on the head, Matt, exactly the problem. We discussed that elsewhere. With satellite monitoring, we don't miss any hurricane anymore whereas in 1933, several hurricanes, not having made landfall, could have disappeared completely unnoticed intohe Atlantic.

In the old days there were those big black binders keeping record of the groundstations. Perhaps an odd ship log was found to enter the records but that's probably it. And then you could count the same hurricane twice (land and ship) or miss the seaborne ones completely.
 
If it wa'sn't for satellites would we have registered Danielle, Karl, Lisa, Nicole, or Otto of http://image.weather.com/images/maps/tropical/spec_trop8_720x486.jpg
 
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