The name
Accents and anything that is not a letter are dropped and the rest is upper-cased, so “José” finds JOSE (R1). An empty box asks you to type a name.
The records
Both NOAA files are read line by line (R2): 3,250 storm records, of which 1,915 carry a real name and 553 names are different. Unnamed storms and numbered depressions (“ONE”, “TWENTY-TWO”) are left out. A storm that crossed from the Atlantic into the Pacific under one name is counted once. Landfalls are the rows NOAA flags “L”; where the files have no such rows (Atlantic 1976–1982, Pacific before 1989) the table says “not flagged”.
For each storm (R3–R4): first and last date, the highest wind while it was tropical, the lowest pressure, and its Saffir-Simpson category from the highest wind it had as a hurricane: 64 knots is Category 1, 83 is 2, 96 is 3, 113 is 4, 137 is 5. Category 3 and up is “major”.
The answer
The chart shows the strongest storm of the name: highest category, then highest wind, then lowest pressure, then the earliest (R5). The one line on the parchment follows fixed rules (R10): a hurricane says yes with year and category; a name that only made tropical storms says so; a name never used says where it stands on the official lists (R6), or that the sea is still.
“Spelled differently?” lists names one letter away, or two for names of six letters or more (R7). “Same year, same letter” lists the other storms of the strongest storm's year that start with the same letter (R8). The bar compares with all names: 295 of 553 used names, 53 %, had at least one major hurricane (R9).
The chart
Each sheet is a plain latitude and longitude map, with east-west distances scaled by the cosine of the sheet's middle latitude (R12). Pacific storms go on the East Pacific sheet; Atlantic storms that stay inside the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean go on that sheet; all others on the Atlantic sheet. A track that leaves the sheet is cut at the edge with an arrow.
The line is drawn through NOAA's six-hourly positions. Its width follows the wind, from 1.2 to 7.2 pixels between 25 and 185 knots (R13); fine dots mark rows where the storm was extratropical, a low, a wave or a disturbance. Ticks across the line are landfalls. The round ink seal sits where the storm peaked.
The small stamp under the name plate is the storm's own record in the NOAA file (R14): the ocean and the storm's number that season, the year, and how many position rows (“fixes”) the record holds.
Deaths
A death toll is shown only as a short quote from the storm's NHC Tropical Cyclone Report, with a link (R11). We never add them up or take a number from anywhere else. Storms without a quote here simply have none yet.
Art
Illustration: AI-generated (Gemini), edited by plusbeauxjours. Coastlines (Natural Earth), the route, the ticks, the seal's number and every word are drawn by code from the data.