tinychaseCyclone kiosks · lowest pressure against peak wind, 1980 to 2025
Pressure and Wind
A hurricane is a hole in the atmosphere, and the wind is air falling into it. The deeper the hole, the faster the wind, so a storm's lowest pressure and its peak wind should sit on one curve. They nearly do. Where they miss the curve is where the storm's size, its latitude and the weather around it show through. Pick a basin to see its own curve against the world's.
The deepest holes on record
Lowest central pressure ever measured, and the highest winds, whole record. Tip's 870 millibars in 1979 has stood for nearly half a century; Patricia came within two.
Why the basins differ
Two storms at the same pressure can carry different winds. A physically large storm spreads its pressure drop over more distance and blows less hard; a storm at high latitude sits in lower surrounding pressure and needs a deeper centre to make the same gradient. The West Pacific's typhoons are on average larger than Atlantic hurricanes and run on a curve shifted toward lower pressure.
Some of the difference is bookkeeping. The archive carries one-minute sustained winds where an agency provides them, but the Japanese and Indian agencies report ten-minute averages, which run about twelve percent lower, and many older values were converted. The records above are as the archive holds them.
Data: TerraPulse tc dex (IBTrACS-style tracks; US federal public domain), fetched 2026-09-27. One point per storm from 1980 on with both a minimum pressure and a peak wind, pressures between 850 and 1015 mb and winds of 34 kt or more. The curves are least-squares fits of the form pressure = a + b times wind squared, the classic quadratic wind-pressure form, one for the world and one per basin, and are descriptive rather than physical. Pressure is missing on almost two thirds of fixes and winds on two fifths, unevenly by basin and era. Records use the whole archive back to the nineteenth century, where pressures were rarely measured at the centre.