Quote of the Day
Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?"
Figure 1: Wind Speed and Air Pressure Distribution in a Hurricane or Typhoon. (Source)
I was watching the weather reports on Hurricane Irma and the discussions on how powerful it is. The most cited metrics for hurricanes and typhoons appears to be wind speed and eye barometric pressure (see Figure 1). I decided to look around for hurricane and typhoon strength data and the Wikipedia turned out to have a page containing large number of tables for all the most intense typhoons and hurricanes in different regions of the world. I used Power Query to (1) import the tables, (2) clean them up, (3) combine them, and (4) rank the storms by air pressure.
I have only personally experienced a weather event like Hurricane Irma once in my life. I was traveling in Taiwan when Typhoon Matmo struck. I was very impressed with the people of Taiwan and how organized they were on handling this event. The only unnerving part of the whole thing was that I was about to take a flight back to the US when a plane crashed at a nearby airport. This made me a bit queasy about how safe it was to fly back. It turned out the crash was because of pilot error.
For those who are interested, my workbook is here. Figure 2 shows the most intense hurricanes in the Atlantic basin when ranked by central barometric pressure.
Figure 2: List of the Most Intense North Atlantic Hurricanes Ranked By Barometric Pressure.
I was also able to generate a list of the top 25 typhoons and hurricanes by air pressure (Figure 3). Notice how the Pacific has had the most intense storms, at least with respect to barometric pressure. Hurricane Patricia was interesting because it was a very intense hurricane that struck Mexico from its western side (see Figure 4).
Figure 3: Worldwide Ranking of Hurricanes and Typhoons by Air Pressure.
Figure 4: Path and Intensity of Hurricane Patricia. (Source)