Fig. 9: Major hurricane parameters during five recent hurricanes which experienced rapid intensification prior to landfall.
From: Coastal flooding in Southwest Florida during Hurricanes Irma and Ian
Time-varying hurricane parameters: radius to maximum wind (a), maximum wind speed (b), central pressure (c) and translational speed (d) during the 72 hours prior and 24 hours after the landfall for Hurricanes Charley (2004), Wilma (2005), Irma (2017), Michael (2018), and Ian (2022). According to NHC definition, RI is defined as an increase of maximum sustained wind speed of 15.28 m/s in 24 hours. Therefore, all five hurricanes experienced RI at some point between 48-hr prior and landfall, but only Michael experienced continued RI in the 24 hours prior to landfall. Created using Mathworks Matlab R2024a based on analysis of two data sources: HURDAT267 and EBTRK most data is the same between datasets, however, radius to maximum wind (RMW) data is extremely sparse in the HURDAT dataset prior to 2021 and EBTRK reanalysis data were used instead.
