Dazzling Map Shows More Than 150 Years of Hurricanes

A new map done up in glowing colors reveals the swirling paths hurricanes and tropical storms have tread across our planet since 1851.

If it looks a little odd at first, it's because this hurricane map offers a unique perspective of the Earth; Antarctica is smack in the middle, and the rest of the planet unfurls around it like the petals of a tulip.
The Americas are on the right, Asia is on the left; the storms plotted on the map grow brighter as their intensity increases.

The effect is not only informative — more than 150 years of hurricane data show that certain regions are consistently in the storms' cross hairs — but also arresting.

Mapmaker John Nelson, the user experience and mapping manager for IDV Solutions, a data visualization company, said that this oddball point of view was the best way to tell the story of the data.

"When I put it onto a rectangular map it was neat looking, but a little bit disappointing," Nelson told Our Amazing Planet. But the unorthodox, bottom-up perspective allowed the curving paths the storms make across the world's oceans to shine, he said.

Nelson used U.S. federal data on tropical storms and hurricanes from 1851 through 2010. A quick glance at the map shows that the number of storms leap up in the latter half of the 20th century, though that's because of technological advances.

With the advent of satellites and hurricane-hunting aircraft, officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began to see storms that their predecessors in earlier ages would have missed.

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