Question for Coop about hurricanes

[bobcatfan]

I dont know if you knew this Coop but i'm a huge weather fan.  I watch the weather channel a lot during hurricane season.  I'm fascinated by the history of hurricanes.  I was looking at wikipedia earlier on some past hurricanes and found hurricane seasons dating back to pre-1900.  You can go back and look at hurricane seasons before 1900, and they will show you the track and wind speeds of each hurricane.  My question is, how is it possible they know that?  How do they know the exact track and top wind speeds of hurricanes back then?  I know they had no technology back then, and no satellites either.  Its not like they were flying reconnaissance airplanes out there to check out the storms and track them. lol.  So how can they give an exact track of a storm and wind speed and say with certainty?  I havent read anywhere that it was a guess, but are they just making an educated guess?  Heres a link to those storms...

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I also wanted to give you a bonus "did you know".  Did you know the late John Hope who was a meteorologist for the weather channel and worked at the National Hurricane Center, added his daughters name to the list of hurricane names back in 1969 which turned out to be one the strongest and deadliest landfalling hurricane in US history, Camille.

[fatelvis04]

I'm not Coop, but I think a lot of it comes from reports they get from ships... It's the best I can think of anyway.

[bobcatfan]

Yeah i thought of that and i imagine that had a hand in it.  But how many ships were in the Atlantic?  Have you seen the tracks of some of those storms?  Some of those hurricanes started way out in the ocean and had some crazy tracks.  I dont know how its possible for the ships to keep up with the track of these storms all the way through, and know what the wind speeds are also.  I cant imagine even if the ships were able to manage to track all these storms, they would do it with any kind of accuracy.

[KFDM COOP]

I'm not Coop, but I think a lot of it comes from reports they get from ships... It's the best I can think of anyway.

Yes, back then Ships relayed the data.