Hello everyone!
With the recent tragedy caused by Hurricane Harvey, and now followed by Hurricane Irma that is still progressing, we've seen a major uptick in questions about destructive weather phenomenon. In situations where we see an unusual amount of activity on a narrow topic, we like to create these Megathreads in order to help keep things centralized. It helps prevent a bunch of similar questions dominating, and also helps users more easily find answers to the questions they might have! A few quick things to keep in mind about how these MEGATHREADS work:
To kick things off though, here are a few previous questions which have already been asked and answered, so make sure to check here before asking your own. None of these answers are the final, definitive response so please don't let them deter you from asking for more elucidation though, of course.. If you know of any I missed (damn that shitty reddit search!), please let me know so I can edit into the OP here:
Did Europeans know about hurricanes before they came to the New World?
What was it like when the first hurricane hit the American colonies? Did they suspect something like that could happen or were they all completely incredulous as to where all this wind and rain appeared from?
Yesterday I looked at a List of deadliest Atlantic hurricanes on Wikipedia and see some precise numbers on death counts for hurricanes hundred of years ago. How did casualty recording take place in these times? How accurate can these numbers be (i.e. 1090 deaths from a hurricane dating to 1622)?
The Mongol invasions of Japan were famously foiled by large storms, and it there is an idea that the Japanese believed that they were a form of divine protection. Is this accurate, and is there any evidence of how the Mongols perceived them?
With respect to the Colonial era in the US, what kind of impact would a major hurricane have? In our interconnected economy today we can account for billions of dollars of damage and lost productivity due to a major storm like Katrina or Harvey; do we have similar indications for long lasting impacts of major weather events during the Colonial period? Or would the relatively low level of technology mean that, once debris was cleared and shelters rebuilt, there were relatively fewer long lasting effects of a major storm?
I remember reading somewhere, perhaps in a course I took on the ancient world, that linked the flood mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh to the famous flood in the story of Noah's Ark, alleging that they might have been mythologizing the same event. Is this an actual historical hypothesis? If not, are there any other sorts of large storms we can guess happened from retelling/mythologizing across disparate societies?
Does anyone have a good source on the hurricane that rocked Bordeaux in the middle ages? Were their other well documented European hurricanes in antiquity?
Did a major hurricane ever hit the Caribbean during pirate times? If so, what sort of damage did it do? Are there any recorded events of famous pirates getting caught in/surviving a hurricane, or any other kind of major tropical storm?
Can we add some of these to the FAQ?