Wikipedia:Peer review/1950 Atlantic hurricane season/archive1

1950 Atlantic hurricane season

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I intend to take it to FAC eventually. I worked on the article extensively last spring, and since it now passed a GA review, I thought I'd go for the next step.

Thanks, Hurricanehink (talk) 19:19, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Ruhrfisch comments: Thanks for your work on this - this looks pretty good to me, though there are some things I think need to be clarified or cleaned up before FAC. WIth FAC in mind, here are some suggestions for improvement. I also know you have gotten many hurricane and related articles to FA, so if I suggest something that goes against the WikiProject guidelines, feel free to ignore my advice.

• Having read the whole article, my biggest concerns are discrepancies and the two oddballs. Oddballs first - Tropical Storm Twelve and Cyclone Mike. Twelve is at least included in the total of storms in the lead and infobox (13), but Mike is not. My guess is that all that is known about Mike is in the article, but is there any more that can be said about it? Is there any reason why Mike is not mentioned in the lead somehow? Perhaps something like "At the time, official records indicated only 12 storms, but by YEAR another (TS 12) had been added to the records for the year, and a fourteenth storm (Mike) is mentioned in some official records, though not in the official totals." Not great, but maybe it gives you the idea.
• As for discrepancies, the lead says Throughout the season, there were a total of 20 fatalities and $37 million in damage (1950 USD). Then we read: Able - 9 traffic fatalities in the US and 26 killed in Canada; Baker - 37 dead in Cuba and one in the US from live wires; Dog - 2 drownings in Antigua, 3 traffic fatalities and 2 drownings, plus 12 more in New England; Easy - 2 deaths by electrocution; King - 7 dead in Cuba, 3 dead in FL and 1 in GA. I added these in my head and came up with about 105 dead (or over 5 times as many as the lead says).
• I added up the monetary damages and the amounts given total about $37 million, so that checks
• Since it was the ACE record holder until 2005, and still second highest, should that be mentioned in the lead?
• Would it also be worth mentioning that one of the storms set the then US record for rainfall in a 24 hour period in the lead?
• Since "Season summary" repeats season from the title and WP:HEAD says to avoid repeating all or part of the title in headers if possible, could it just be called "Summary"?
• Language is rough in spots. I here try to point out as many examples as I can:
  • From the lead why not something like It was an active season with a total of 13 tropical storms that developed into 11 hurricanes. Eight of these became major hurricanes, defined as a Category 3 or greater on the Saffir-Simpson scale; this holds the record as the most systems of such intensity in a single season. The infobox makes the distiction between total storms and hurricanes clearer than the lead currently does.
  • A bit unclear Beginning in the season, the United States Weather Bureau operated with RADAR technology to observe hurricanes 200 miles (320 km) away. Does "Beginning in the season" mean this was the first season for the use of radar to observe hurricanes? (ANd why is it RADAR and not just radar?) Also should the sentence say where the radar stations were - assume they were coastal, but I guess they could also have been ship-borne (probably still too big back then for planes). So assuming I understand the sentence, I would recast it as something like This was the first season in which the United States Weather Bureau used radar technology to observe hurricanes up to 200 miles (320 km) off the coast.
  • How were hurricanes classified (as major) before the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale was developed?
  • To me "through September" implies that the storms were in existence the whole month, so why not say "into September" which seems more accurate? In contrast to the busy August, only three named storms developed in September, although three of the August hurricanes lasted through September.
  • Could the second "the record" just be "it" No seasons since then have broken the record, although the 2005 season later tied the record.
  • Should the note (ref 1 currently) on undercounts for ACE be used at the end of the Season summary section too (not just for the table)?
  • Baker - don't need quickly and rapidly in same sentence, and I think October here has to be a typo for August?? It quickly attained hurricane status, and by October 21 had rapidly intensified to peak winds of 120 mph (195 km/h).
  • Awkward - can the phrase I struck just be dropped? Hurricane Charlie developed on August 21 to the southwest of the Cape Verde islands, although at the time, it was not considered a tropical cyclone until a week later.
  • Watch WP:OVERLINKing - generally once in the lead and first time in the body of the article are sufficient, but Saffir-Simpson scale is linked 3x, as is Hurricane Hunters
  • Item - fragment (no verb) Four days after the previous storm dissipated, another tropical storm [formed?] in the Gulf of Mexico, just off the northwest coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. I also think it is useful to include the date of formation explicitly - there is no separate article on Item, so if soeone comes here looking for it, they then have to read the previous section and do the math to figure out the day it formed.
• Storm names section needs a ref - the Mike ref looks like it would do
• I just checked and there is not even a redirect for Hurricane Item (although this comes up in a search here). I would make redirects to here (and to the article sections) for each of the storms which does not have an article.

Hope this helps. If my comments are useful, please consider peer reviewing an article, especially one at Wikipedia:Peer review/backlog (which is how I found this article). I do not watch peer reviews, so if you have questions or comments, please contact me on my talk page. Yours, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 14:33, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments. I'll get to these in the next few days. Hurricanehink (talk) 17:07, 28 October 2010 (UTC)