Fingerprint matching | 128 storms | 1851-2025

Analog Finder

Two ways in: compare a real storm's track against history, or describe a hypothetical scenario. Analogs are context, never forecasts.

Compare a Real Storm's Track

Pick a storm to see which others ran a similar path, scored two genuinely different ways: how close the tracks actually ran to each other near Florida, and how each storm handled the Florida Straits / Cuba shelf on approach, a narrow shallow shelf that tends to interrupt intensification and produce more erratic short-term heading changes than the deep open Gulf or Atlantic. Both scores show separately on every card, so the ranking is never a black box. Defaults to storms since 1950, where positions come from direct aircraft/satellite tracking rather than reconstructed reports.

Comparing to AL061946 (1946) — peak 2 · FL impact 1.

Formed

1946-10-05

Dissipated

1946-10-14

Peak wind

85 kt

Lifetime category

2

Min pressure

977 mb (lifetime)

Florida date

1946-10-08

Approach

gulf

FL regions

SW1 NW1

Center landfall

yes (1)

ENSO (ASO ONI)

pre-1950, no ONI

Peak surge (FL)

none exists for this era

Surge: no curated record, and none is likely to exist. Reliable landfall-zone surge observation generally predates neither the modern gauge network nor NHC Tropical Cyclone Reports for storms of this era; surge comparisons on this site skew modern as a result (disclosed on the methodology page).

Storms before 1950 predate aircraft and satellite tracking; their positions are reconstructed from ship and coastal reports, so a track-shape match here carries more positional uncertainty than a modern-era one, even when the visual overlap looks striking.

Ranked by near-Florida path first (how close the two tracks actually ran to each other once near the state), then by Straits/Cuba approach (did each handle the shallow shelf the same way on the way in), then by trait match. These answer genuinely different questions -- a storm can wobble identically on approach and still land 300 miles apart, or vice versa -- so they are shown separately, never blended into one number.

Showing 83 matches out of every candidate that scored above zero in this range -- watch the near-Florida number taper toward the bottom of the list; that decay is the ranking actually working, not an artifact.

• AL061946 (1946)
• AL131944 (1944)
• Florida Straits corridor

Track colors below are always: teal = AL061946, orange = the comparison storm named in each card. On desktop these show as compact thumbnails, three per row; being vector maps they stay crisp at any size. Click a storm's name to open its own full-size record and track.

View AL061946 and these matches in the Zone Lab tool