There are currently … active tropical cyclones in the basins watched by NOAA’s National Hurricane Center: the Atlantic, the Eastern Pacific and the Central Pacific. Figures refresh every fifteen minutes from the latest official advisory.
Asking the National Hurricane Center…
The shaded area is the uncertainty cone: the region the centre of the storm may pass through over the next five days. The dots mark the forecast position at each advisory and the dashed line joins them.
The cone is drawn from the forecast errors of the last five years: two times out of three the centre stays inside it. Being outside the cone does not mean you are safe — wind and rain reach far beyond the centre.
Active tornado, hurricane, tropical storm and storm surge products issued by the National Weather Service. A watch means conditions are favourable; a warning means it is happening or about to.
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It ranks hurricanes by one-minute maximum sustained wind, and by that alone. It does not measure rainfall or storm surge, which cause most of the deaths: a slow category 1 can kill more people than a fast category 4.
| Category | Wind | Knots | What to expect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category 1 | 119–153 km/h | 64–82 kt | Roof, gutter and tree damage. Power outages lasting hours to days. |
| Category 2 | 154–177 km/h | 83–95 kt | Major roof and siding damage. Snapped trees and near-total power loss. |
| Category 3 | 178–208 km/h | 96–112 kt | Devastating damage. Whole roofs lost. Water and power out for days or weeks. |
| Category 4 | 209–251 km/h | 113–136 kt | Catastrophic damage. Walls and roofs destroyed. The area is uninhabitable for weeks. |
| Category 5 | ≥ 252 km/h | ≥ 137 kt | Near-total destruction of light structures. The area is cut off for weeks or months. |
Below 119 km/h (64 kt) it is not a hurricane: 63–118 km/h is a tropical storm, and below 63 a tropical depression.
The United States sees around 1,200 tornadoes a year, more than any other country, mostly across the central plains between March and June. The difference between the two official messages is the one that decides what you do:
Tornado Watch: the atmosphere has what it takes to produce tornadoes in the coming hours, over a wide area. Time to work out where you would shelter and to keep alerts switched on.
Tornado Warning: radar has detected rotation, or someone has seen a tornado. It covers a small area and the next few minutes. Time to get to a basement or an interior room with no windows, on the lowest floor.
Products in force appear above as soon as they are issued, because they come from the same official feed that drives the alerts on American phones.
Positions, intensities, tracks and cones come from NOAA’s National Hurricane Center, the official authority for the Atlantic and the north-eastern Pacific, and from the Central Pacific Hurricane Center for the Hawaii region. They are read from its public active-storms file and from the mapping products it publishes with every advisory.
Tornado and hurricane products come from the National Weather Service API, the same one behind emergency alerts on American phones.
The north-western Pacific — Asia’s typhoons — and the Indian Ocean are not covered by the NHC and therefore do not appear here. For those basins the references are each country’s national agency and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center.
This page informs; it replaces no one. With a cyclone approaching, the only source that counts is your national weather service and your local emergency management agency.
