The CMEHI is used as the basis for trading hurricane futures and options on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME).
Kantha's paper[3] in Eos developed a number of indices based on various characteristics of hurricanes.
[5] The data for the CMEHI comes from the public advisories issued for named storms by the National Hurricane Center.
For example, Advisory 23A[6] for Hurricane Katrina at 1pm Central daylight time on Sunday, August 28, 2005, gave the maximum sustained wind speed of 175 mph and the radius of hurricane-force winds of 105 miles resulting in a CMEHI value of 27.9.
However, using data from the HURSAT[71] database at NOAA it is possible to construct a set of CMEHI values for storms back to 1983.