Hurricane map
The Guardian has a map (also with animated thingies) of all the hurricanes since 1851.
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One of the most dramatic features is the semicircle of hurricanes in the Southern Hemisphere. That’s because the ocean isn’t warm enough in the other half: see this graph from NOAA
Since the oceans are getting warmer, you might expect hurricanes to be getting worse. It’s a bit more complicated than that, since climate change is warming the upper atmosphere more than the surface, which would tend to decrease hurricanes. Still, NOAA expects more really intense hurricances and greater total rainfall from them, and they think it’s more likely than not that the overall frequency will go up.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »