1972 Pacific Hurricane Season

The 1972 Pacific hurricane season was an ongoing event in tropical cyclone meteorology. There were few notable storms this year. No one was killed and storm effects were generally not serious. The most notable systems were Hurricane Celeste and Joanne. Celeste was the strongest storm of the season, and caused heavy damage to Johnston Atoll. Hurricane Joanne brought gale force the Continental United States and caused flooding in Arizona and northern Mexico. The only other system to directly impact land was Hurricane Annette.

The season began on May 15, 1972 in the east Pacific, and on June 1, 1972 in the central Pacific. It ended on November 30, 1972. These dates conventionally delimit the period of time when tropical cyclones form in the east Pacific Ocean. This season had a below average number of storms. There were twenty tropical cyclones, four of which were in the central Pacific. Of those, four were tropical storms, eight were hurricanes, and four were major hurricanes that reached Category 3 or higher on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. In the central Pacific, two tropical storms and two tropical depressions formed. One of the depressions and one of the storms crossed the dateline to become typhoons in the 1972 Pacific typhoon season.