Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2018 October 22

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October 22

Missing hurricane in 1954

According to Hurricane Alice (December 1954), two cyclones, including a Category 2 hurricane, operationally went undetected in 1954. (1) What's the difference between operationally went undetected and plain undetected, and how would they detect it afterward? The 2005 Azores subtropical storm was detected after the fact by checking satellite radar imagery, but that wasn't available in 1954. (2) What storms are being talked about? 1954 Atlantic hurricane season#Hurricane Thirteen was a Category 2 hurricane, but there's an awful lot of detail in the article for something that didn't get detected to some extent, and the final sentence of its section sounds like the storm-tracking people chose not to name it (it wasn't going to hit anything, so why bother naming it?), rather than that they missed it.

FYI, the sentence in the Alice article has three citations, but two are 404 errors and the other doesn't mention this. Nyttend (talk) 02:35, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

They are listed at 1954 Atlantic hurricane season, and labeled there "Tropical Storm 1" and "Tropical Storm 2". TS1 explicitly mentions that it was only detected through re-analysis. TS 2 is a but more obscure, but you can see them listed here which is the source (ctrl-F search for May 27-31 for the first and June 17-25 for the second). You can learn more about how they detect such storms later at Atlantic hurricane reanalysis project. --Jayron32 15:20, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for the pointers. So what does operationally went undetected mean, if the latter storm got investigated by hurricane hunters? I'd seen these lines, but I assumed they weren't the ones I needed, since both got reported by ships. And now I'm more confused, since Evidence for the existence of this system [the first one] was extracted from the Cooperative Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (COA), the Historical Weather Maps (HWM) series, the Climatological Data publication (NCDC), the Local Climatological Data forms (NCDC), the Monthly Weather Review Tracks of Centers of Cyclones (May 1954), and the United States Weather Bureau microfilm data, as well as the second one getting aerial investigation. Nyttend (talk) 00:50, 23 October 2018 (UTC)