Tropical Atlantic Update: Centennial of the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926

[this post is a reproduction of the webpage at https://bmcnoldy.earth.miami.edu/tropics/miami26/, which I first shared with the community on August 18]

This was the seventh known tropical cyclone to form during the 1926 Atlantic hurricane season, and it was the second out of three major hurricanes to impact Florida that year. An easterly wave likely left the African coast around September 6 but was not officially tracked until September 11 when it was identified as a tropical storm about 1,000 miles east of the Lesser Antilles.

The Great Miami Hurricane's track and intensity (colored by Saffir-Simpson category, which did not exist at the time); dates are labeled along the track at 0000 UTC each day.

In 1926, routine weather satellite coverage was still five decades away, so observations came from "ships of opportunity" or nearby islands which could provide helpful observations of wind and pressure from which the storm center, pressure, and intensity could be estimated.

The storm first reached land on the afternoon of September 16 as it crossed the Turks and Caicos Islands as a Category 4 hurricane with 150 mph sustained winds... this was the peak intensity of the storm's lifetime. On September 17-18 it crossed the Bahamas, still at Category 4 intensity with 145 mph peak sustained winds as it tracked over Andros Island.

Surface wind swath over the lifetime of the storm produced using a parametric model that utilizes observed storm parameters such as intensity, radius of maximum wind, radii of tropical storm force wind, and track. Any missing parameters were carefully estimated. The color families correspond to the Saffir-Simpson Scale: tropical storm in blues, Category 1 hurricane in greens, Category 2 in yellows, Category 3 in reds, Category 4 in purples, and Category 5 in grays.

Surface wind swath zoomed in over Florida, produced using a parametric model that utilizes observed storm parameters such as intensity, radius of maximum wind, radii of tropical storm force wind, and track. Any missing parameters were carefully estimated. The color families correspond to the Saffir-Simpson Scale: tropical storm in blues, Category 1 hurricane in greens, Category 2 in yellows, Category 3 in reds, Category 4 in purples, and Category 5 in grays.

After the eye exited Andros Island, it was a short 7-hour, 140-mile trek across the Straits of Florida. The Category 4 hurricane made landfall 13.5 miles south of downtown Miami at 6:30 am on September 18. Peak sustained winds were 145 mph, and the radius of maximum wind in the eyewall was 23 miles at the time. That put Miami directly in the calm eye for approximately 35 minutes, and in the northern eyewall with the maximum onshore winds immediately before and after that.

Estimated surface wind field during a 12-hour period centered on the time of landfall in Miami-Dade County (called Dade County then). The decay of wind speed over land is modeled using approximate land use data from the time.

The first storm warning for the Miami area was issued just 18 hours prior to landfall, and a hurricane warning was issued only 7 hours prior to landfall. Several ingredients converged to make this an especially destructive and deadly storm: 1) the extreme intensity and storm surge, 2) the urban area it impacted, 3) the large number of people living there who had never experienced a hurricane, 4) the rush of people into the open during the calm eye, not knowing the worst would come abruptly just minutes later, and 5), the very brief warning previously mentioned.

There is nothing like the 1926 hurricane in the historical record for Miami – it was very intense, very large, and passed directly over downtown. It came at a time when forecasts were primitive, warnings were insufficient, and people were inexperienced. This hurricane struck around sunrise on September 18, 1926 and instantly halted the seemingly boundless land boom, shattered the image of a tropical paradise, and plunged the area into an economic depression three years before the Great Depression began for the rest of the country.

This storm also has special significance to the University of Miami. The university was established in 1925, and construction on the campus began shortly after. The new buildings suffered extensive damage, but amazingly, the university still opened for classes in October 1926. This is the origin of the "Miami Hurricanes".

I will not attempt to retell the impacts in words and photos, that has been done in many places, most succinctly by the NWS Miami Office. Experts have shown that if this exact hurricane were to occur in 2026, it would be the costliest hurricane in U.S. history.

The only Category 3+ hurricane since 1926 to pass directly over Miami was Hurricane King in 1950. It was slightly weaker than the 1926 hurricane at landfall (peak sustained winds of 130 mph compared to 145 mph), but still a Category 4 hurricane. Furthermore, it was significantly smaller (eyewall was about 12 miles in diameter compared to 46 miles) and the warning time leading up to it was twice as long (36 hours compared to 18 hours). Those factors all helped to make King much less deadly, destructive, and infamous than the 1926 hurricane.

Then in 1992, Category 5 Hurricane Andrew did not pass directly over Miami, but the eye made landfall about 20 miles south of downtown and was very impactful. Hurricanes can be small, large, and anything in between. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 was very large. King was extraordinarily compact and Andrew was very small. One measure of a hurricane’s destructive power is called the “integrated kinetic energy”. The 1926 hurricane had approximately 6 times more energy than King and 4 times more than Andrew at their landfalls in southeast Florida (170 TJ vs 30 TJ vs 43 TJ).

Estimated surface wind field at landfall for the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 (left), Hurricane King in 1950 (center), and Hurricane Andrew in 1992 (right). Select storm statistics are listed in the upper right of each panel: intensity ("VMAX" in knots), radius of maximum wind ("RMW" in nautical miles), and integrated kinetic energy ("IKE" in Terajoules). The storm track is shown by the thin maroon line.

I want to thank John Knaff, Chris Landsea, and Dave Nolan for various contributions to bringing the wind field of this historic hurricane to life. I worked with John to iterate on several values of the radius of tropical storm winds ("R34"), Chris provided feedback and approval from a seasoned veteran of hurricane reanalysis, and Dave provided a WRF-derived "roughness length" dataset to properly handle the decay of wind speed over land. To adapt the modern high-resolution roughness length data to 1926, I reduced any urban areas to woodland to somewhat reproduce the smaller and fewer buildings of the time. I then applied a smoothing filter to remove the impression of spatial precision. Both the data and the model have assumptions, approximations, and estimates, so this is only intended to provide an educated rough guess of what this hurricane's wind field may have looked like.

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