Source for official historical data on Gulf Coast hurricanes

Site Map - National Weather Service Office - Lake Charles, LA:

Atlantic Tropical Storms and Hurricanes Affecting The United States:1899-2000

A Historical Study of Tropical Storms and Hurricanes That Have Affected Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas

Louisiana Hurricane History
16th Century Hurricanes
18th Century Hurricanes
Early 19th Century Hurricanes
Late 19th Century Hurricanes
Early 20th Century Hurricanes
Late 20th Century Hurricanes
Brief Climatology of Louisiana's Tropical Cyclones

Texas Hurricane History
Late 19th Century Hurricanes
Early 20th Century Hurricanes
Late 20th Century Hurricanes

Above is a list of topics included in the historical hurricane data available from the website of the National Weather Service at Lake Charles, LA.

You can find all sorts of interesting details of previous storms in the Texas and Louisiana coasts including five storms that have flooded New Orleans, three of them since WW2, and the season when the Texas Gulf Coast was hit three times. Gives you a different perspective on all that stuff from Al Gore and company that global warming caused Katrina and Rita, that Bush is to blame for not implementing Kyoto, etc.

Note particularly that we have relatively little information on these storms the farther back you go in history. The first storm ever to be penetrated by an airplane was one that hit Texas during WW2. The first ever real-time radio report of a tropical storm by a ship at sea was from a ship in the Gulf of Mexico reporting to New Orleans in 1909.

For many storms before the 1950s, our pressure and wind speed data are limited to the point where the equipment failed or the operators fled. Frequently we are limited to instrument readings from land stations or ships that were well off the track of the center of a storm's circulation. Thus, there is some bias toward under-rating storm categories for these older storms.