Maritime History

1893 Atlantic hurricane season

The 1893 Atlantic hurricane season featured the only known instance of more than one tropical cyclone causing at least 1,000 deaths in the United States. It was a fairly active season, with 12 tropical storms forming, 10 of which became hurricanes. Of those, five became major hurricanes. The season is considered hyper-active in terms of accumulated cyclone energy, achieving a total of 231 units, which was the highest ever recorded at the time and remains the third-highest ever recorded in the Atlantic basin. Additionally, 1893 became one of two seasons on record to see four Atlantic hurricanes active simultaneously, along with 1998. In the absence of modern satellite and other remote-sensing technologies, only storms that affected populated land areas or encountered ships at sea were recorded, so the actual total could be higher. An undercount bias of zero to six tropical cyclones per year between 1851 and 1885 and zero to four per year between 1886 and 1910 has been estimated. The first system was initially observed on June 12 in the Bay of Campeche, while the twelfth and final storm transitioned into an extratropical cyclone on November 9 over the northwestern Atlantic. Neither the reanalysis by meteorologists José Fernández-Partagás and Henry F. Diaz in 1996 nor the Atlantic hurricane reanalysis project added or removed any storms from the official hurricane database (HURDAT), though the former revised the tracks of a few systems and the latter upgraded two cyclones to major hurricane intensity. However, a study by climate researcher Michael Chenoweth, published in 2014, lists thirteen tropical cyclones, proposing the removal of fifth, eleventh, and twelfth systems as well as the addition of four new storms, but his reanalysis has yet to be added to HURDAT. The most intense tropical cyclone of the season, the tenth system, peaked as a Category 4 hurricane on the present-day Saffir–Simpson scale with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph (215 km/h). On October 2, the hurricane struck Louisiana, causing approximately 2,000 fatalities and about $5 million (1893 USD) in damage. Another very deadly cyclone, the season's sixth system, brought devastating storm surge and high winds to the Sea Islands region of the Southeastern United States and nearby inland areas in late August, killing at least 1,000 people and inflicting damage totaling about $1 million.

Also on this shelf

See also

• ▸HMS Regent (N41)
• ▸Elisabeth of Schönau
• ▸British ensign

Uncatalogued shelf

Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.