1945 meteorology

The 1945 Homestead hurricane, known informally as Kappler's hurricane, was the most intense tropical cyclone to strike the U.S. state of Florida since 1935. The ninth tropical storm, third hurricane, and third major hurricane of the season, it developed east-northeast of the Leeward Islands on September 12. Moving briskly west-northwestward, the storm became a major hurricane on September 13. The system moved over the Turks and Caicos Islands the following day and then Andros on September 15. Later that day, the storm peaked as a Category 4 hurricane on the modern-day Saffir–Simpson scale with winds of 130 mph (215 km/h). Late on September 15, the hurricane made landfall on Key Largo and then in southern Dade County, Florida.

The 1945 Pacific typhoon season was the first official season to be included in the West Pacific typhoon database. It was also the first season to name storms. It has no official bounds; it ran year-round in 1945, but most tropical cyclones tend to form in the northwestern Pacific Ocean between June and December. These dates conventionally delimit the period of each year when most tropical cyclones form in the northwestern Pacific Ocean.

On April 12, 1945, a tornado outbreak occurred in the Midwestern United States, producing numerous strong tornadoes and killing at least 128 people and injuring over 1,000 others; however, the concurrent death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt overshadowed news of the outbreak. On July 5, 1945, the United States Weather Bureau documented this entire outbreak as a single wind event, not a tornado or series of tornadoes, which killed 119 people and caused $2.65 million (1945 USD) in damage. This report was later corrected on December 1, 1945, when the report was corrected to be a series of tornadoes. J. L. Baldwin, a meteorologist at the United States Weather Bureau office in Washington, D.C., later stated that, “these storms made April 12 the worst single day of tornado disaster[s] in the history of Oklahoma.”