1952 Atlantic hurricane season

A drought summer and a lighter workload

Grady Norton's Monthly Weather Review summary called 1952 the first below-normal Atlantic season since 1946. He charted six storms, all of which reached hurricane force at some point, and linked the lull to drought across the eastern United States: an informal study of the past half century found that seasons after drought summers averaged about half as many hurricanes. The Miami centre issued 112 advisories, and Norton described the year's work as the lightest since coordinated warnings and reconnaissance began.

The site's archive counts 11 tropical storms, 5 hurricanes and 2 major hurricanes, with an accumulated cyclone energy of 68.8. The gap with Norton's six comes from later reanalysis, which added short-lived and partly subtropical systems from ship reports, including storms near the Azores and Cape Verde and a large November storm north of the Virgin Islands. Reanalysis also lowered Dog to a tropical storm; aircraft found hurricane-force squalls in 1952, but no closed centre.

A February storm over Florida

The archive's first tropical-stage record falls on 3 February. A disturbance formed in the western Caribbean, passed Key West and crossed southern Florida from near Cape Sable past Miami, then became tropical over the Atlantic and peaked at 70 mph. It is the only tropical or subtropical storm on record in February. Miami recorded an 84 mph gust, and the storm drove a freighter ashore on Portsmouth Island in the Outer Banks, where the crew of 26 was rescued.

Able comes ashore near Beaufort

Hurricane Able was a lopsided storm for days, with hurricane-force squalls on its northeast side and only 25 knot winds in its open southern half. It organized on 29 and 30 August, when Navy crews reported a principal eye 38 miles wide with a second eye just to its southwest. Able turned north past the Georgia coast and moved inland near Beaufort, South Carolina, between 10 and 11 p.m. on 30 August. The strongest winds, near 100 mph, crossed the marshes between Beaufort and Charleston, where few people lived. The archive gives Able an 85 kt peak.

Able held its circulation all the way to Maine, drawing on warm, humid southerly air east of the Appalachians. Unofficial rain totals reached 6.33 inches at Fort Bragg and 5.08 inches at Allentown, and a tornado struck Franconia, Virginia. The Weather Bureau blamed Able indirectly for two deaths in South Carolina and one in Pennsylvania, and estimated property and crop damage in the Atlantic states at $2,750,000 in 1952 dollars. Days earlier a weaker tropical storm had come ashore near Myrtle Beach.

Baker, Charlie and Easy stay offshore

Hurricane Baker, first reported by the Norwegian ship Fridtjof Nansen on 1 September, followed Able's early path, then curved between Cape Hatteras and Bermuda. Aircraft estimated 100 to 115 mph winds with 140 mph gusts from 2 to 6 September, and 25 advisories helped ships steer clear. Gusts reached 70 mph on Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula.

Hurricane Charlie began as a wave that brought flooding rain to Puerto Rico on 22 and 23 September, killing four people and causing about $1,000,000 in damage, in 1952 dollars, before a centre formed. It re-formed near Turks Island, and aircraft found a small hurricane east of the Bahamas on 25 September. Charlie peaked in the archive at 105 kt, a major hurricane, and passed northwest of Bermuda. Hurricane Easy flared to 95 knots by aircraft on 8 October about 700 miles east of Antigua and died within two days, a storm Norton said only B-29 reconnaissance could have found.

Hurricane Fox crosses Cuba

Hurricane Fox formed off Colombia on 20 October and strengthened as it moved north. On 24 October it reached Cayo Guano del Este, off the south coast of Cuba 30 or 40 miles west of Cienfuegos, where the weather station measured 933.6 mb and gusts of 170 to 180 mph. Aircraft crews said the driven rain stripped paint from the nose of their plane. The archive records Fox as the season's strongest storm, 125 kt and Category 4 on 24 October, with the lowest pressure of the year, 934 hPa. The current best track gives its winds on reaching the cay as 145 mph.

Fox crossed rural sugar country, where 36 of Cuba's 161 sugar mills lay in the storm area. In Aguada de Pasajeros, a town of 25,000, about 600 homes were destroyed and a thousand or more damaged. Norton reported no dollar estimate and credited Cuban observers and warnings for the absence of deaths. Other accounts give 600 deaths in Cuba and $10 million in damage, in 1952 dollars.

Fox kept winds of 100 mph or more as it wandered east and east-southeast through the Bahamas, a swing Norton found unexplained by the weather charts. Cat Island reported 110 mph, and about 30 percent of the tomato crop on southern Eleuthera was destroyed. Near Watling Island Fox turned back north, joined an old polar front and passed northwest of Bermuda on 28 October.

The last phonetic-alphabet names

1952 was the third and final season to take storm names from the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet, from Able to Fox. The archive's last tropical-stage record comes from the unnamed November storm, on 30 November.