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Hurricanes in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of news about hurricanes and other tropical cyclones (typhoons, cyclones and tropical storms) from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about a tropical cyclone, with its date, location, tone, machine-assigned priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
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Key findings
In a global news index, an average of 49.84% of each year's coverage of hurricanes and other tropical cyclones was published in August, September and October over the complete years 2019–2025, against 25% if coverage were spread evenly across the year.
Basis: Within-year month shares of 296,333 matched articles, averaged over the complete years 2019–2025; September alone holds 19.07%.
October 2024, the month of Hurricane Milton and of the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, was the month in which tropical cyclones took their largest share of the index's news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 102.1 articles per 10,000, narrowly above September 2019 (100.74), the month of Hurricane Dorian.
Basis: Monthly matched articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026.
Tropical cyclones took 27.14 of every 10,000 news articles in 2024, 1.42 times their 2023 share (19.18), while the 2025 share (18.01) was 37.5% below that of 2019 (28.8), so news attention to the topic did not trend upward between 2019 and 2025.
Basis: Annual matched articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year, 2019–2025.
Of tropical-cyclone articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 69.2% were negative in tone, 2.06 times the 33.6% negative share across all news in the same index.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive; 99.7% of the article sample carries a label.
Between January 2023 and July 2026, the news index's machine-assigned priority rating placed 73.1% of tropical-cyclone articles at critical priority (7 or higher on a 1–9 scale), 1.72 times the 42.6% share for all news.
Basis: Top priority label per article; critical = priority ≥ 7.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 53,993 | 57.99% | 1.2 |
| India | 8,048 | 8.64% | 0.65 |
| Australia | 2,856 | 3.07% | 1.43 |
| New Zealand | 2,803 | 3.01% | 4.65 |
| Philippines | 2,495 | 2.68% | 8.5 |
| China | 2,400 | 2.58% | 0.98 |
| Mexico | 1,897 | 2.04% | 6.59 |
| Jamaica | 1,671 | 1.79% | 21.09 |
| Canada | 1,161 | 1.25% | 0.58 |
| United Kingdom | 1,050 | 1.13% | 0.19 |
| Italy | 769 | 0.83% | 0.85 |
| Vietnam | 762 | 0.82% | 4.49 |
| Japan | 761 | 0.82% | 0.77 |
| Puerto Rico | 751 | 0.81% | 10.55 |
| France | 715 | 0.77% | 0.39 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "hurricane" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Hurricanes in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23445707