tinychaseCyclone kiosks · 24-hour wind changes, 1980 to 2025
Rapid Intensification
The forecasts that fail worst are the ones where a storm gains 30 knots or more in a single day. Forecasters call it rapid intensification and it is the difference between a Category 1 evacuation and a Category 4 landfall. Here is how often it has happened to hurricane-strength storms, by basin and five-year period, and the fastest jumps on record.
A day in the life of the wind
Every 24-hour change in sustained wind for storms that reached hurricane strength, all basins. Most days a storm changes by ten knots or less. The tail on the right is rapid intensification.
The fastest jumps
The largest 24-hour gain for each storm, top fifteen. Knots before and after.
Data: TerraPulse tc dex (IBTrACS-style tracks; US federal public domain), storms from 1980 on, fetched 2026-09-27. A 24-hour change pairs each fix with the fix exactly 24 hours later on the same storm; a storm counts as rapidly intensifying if any such pair gains 30 kt or more, the NHC's threshold. The share is among storms that reached 64 kt. Wind values are the archive's one-minute sustained winds and are missing on many fixes outside the Atlantic and East Pacific, above all before the 1990s, so early periods in the Indian and South Pacific basins rest on small counts and the kiosk shows the count with every share. The upward drift since 1980 is consistent with the published literature but also with better observation; this table cannot separate the two.