Hurricanes are never good news, but they do make history. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has put a lot of that history in one place, with its Historical Hurricane Tracks website,  which puts more than 170 years of global hurricane data into an interactive map.

The site serves up data on global hurricanes as they made landfall going back to 1842, long before hurricanes were given names, and provides links to information on tropical cyclones in the United States since 1958, and other U.S. storms dating back to 1851. The most recent addition to the site provides details on last year’s Hurricane Sandy.

Visitors to the site can search by location, storm name or ocean basin and select the search area  (by nautical miles, statute miles or kilometers). Selecting Miami, for example, will display  a map on south Florida criss-crossed by the tracks of many a hurricane....