The 1850 Atlantic hurricane season was the last season excluded from the scope of the official Atlantic hurricane database. Meteorological records are sparse and generally incomplete, but indicate that three significant tropical cyclones affected land. The first system struck North Carolina on July 18, causing significant damage before battering the Mid-Atlantic states.
About 1850 Atlantic hurricane season in brief
The 1850 Atlantic hurricane season was the last season excluded from the scope of the official Atlantic hurricane database. Meteorological records are sparse and generally incomplete, but indicate that three significant tropical cyclones affected land. The first system struck North Carolina on July 18, causing significant damage before battering the Mid-Atlantic states with high tides, strong winds, and heavy rainfall. On August 22, a strong hurricane impacted Havana, Cuba, destroying fruit trees and disrupting shipping, before making landfall on the Florida Panhandle with an enormous storm surge. On September 7 and 8, a hurricane brushed the coastline from New York to Cape Cod with gusty winds and appreciable rainfall, and left many ships in distress. The system later struck Atlantic Canada, likely causing \”great loss of property and lives\”, though damage reports were limited. Fragmented records exist of other hurricanes, including two which remained over open seas in early September and the middle of October. Unusually, all three heavily impacted the northeastern states; Ludlum compares the season to 1954, in which three major tropical systems impacted the Eastern Seaboard. More traditional hurricane targets, such as Florida, were spared the brunt of seasonal tropical cyclone activity in 1850, while the atmosphere farther north was abnormally tropical. Newark, New Jersey, had its warmest—and one of its rainiest—summers on record at the time, owing to frequent nearby hurricanes and the influx of tropical air.
In the countryside, low-lying hay fields were flooded and most of the corn crop was decimated. The storm cut off communications between Baltimore and surrounding areas, which one captain observed to be the worst he had ever observed. A train station and locomotive were washed into an adjacent waterway, and some vessels were delayed by the storm, which he had observed by the captain, which was the worst ever observed by a ship captain. A ship captain observed that the storm held to be one of the worst storms he ever observed, and that some vessels had incurred extensive damage and had to be towed to port. A man was killed when his boat collided with a larger ship in the rough seas and sank. A woman was killed by a falling tree in the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, which took the lives of 20 people in various incidents, and a man died when a train was washed into a flooded waterway in Bladensburg, Maryland, which had also been hit by a storm. A man was killed in a storm in the Chesapeake Bay, while coastal communities endured persistent gale-force winds while torrential rainfall accompanied by floodwaters swelled above their banks. The man was later found dead in a houseboat in New York City, where he was buried in a shallow grave. The season is regarded as incomplete, as meteorological reports pertaining to the season were largely lost in a Smithsonian Institution fire in 1856, limiting what is known about hurricane activity in the 1850.
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This page is based on the article 1850 Atlantic hurricane season published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 11, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
