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| Best Track (HURDAT) | |
|---|---|
| Name | Best Track (HURDAT) |
| Type | dataset |
| Region | North Atlantic, East Pacific |
| Maintained by | National Hurricane Center / National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration |
| First release | 1851 (Atlantic) |
| Format | tabular, text |
Best Track (HURDAT)
Best Track (HURDAT) is the principal post-storm analyzed track and intensity dataset compiled for Atlantic Ocean and Northeast Pacific tropical cyclones, issued by the National Hurricane Center and archived by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration alongside the National Centers for Environmental Prediction and the National Weather Service. It serves as the authoritative historical record for agencies such as the United States Department of Commerce, the World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations, and research institutions including the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, the University of Miami, and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. Best Track data underpin analyses by groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the American Meteorological Society, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The dataset provides six-hourly (and sub-six-hourly for some storms) positions, maximum sustained wind speeds, minimum central pressure, and storm classification for systems across the Atlantic hurricane basin and the Eastern Pacific hurricane basin. Best Track plays a central role for modeling centers such as the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Met Office, and the Japan Meteorological Agency, and supports operational entities like Federal Emergency Management Agency and emergency managers in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and Caribbean territories including Puerto Rico and Cuba. Researchers from institutions including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Princeton University, University of Colorado Boulder, and Stanford University use Best Track alongside datasets from ERS-1, TOPEX/Poseidon, TRMM, GPM, and GOES satellites.
HURDAT originated from efforts in the mid-19th century to catalog storms affecting the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, with early compilations tied to maritime records from ports such as New Orleans, Charleston, Havana, and Kingston, Jamaica. Systematic modernization occurred under the United States Weather Bureau and later the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center before consolidation at the National Hurricane Center. Significant revisions occurred after landmark events like the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, Hurricane Camille (1969), Hurricane Andrew (1992), and Hurricane Katrina (2005), prompting retrospective analyses by teams including scholars from the Smithsonian Institution and the NOAA Paleoclimatology Program. The dataset evolved through collaborations with the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship, researchers at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, and regulatory reviews by the Office of Management and Budget and the United States Congress.
HURDAT entries include storm identifiers, six-hourly synoptic times, latitude and longitude points referenced to coastal markers like Cape Hatteras, Cape Verde, and Bahamas, maximum sustained winds, central pressure, and status flags indicating types such as tropical storm, hurricane, subtropical cyclone, or extratropical cyclone. The file format is plaintext with fixed-field records used by modelers at the European Union Copernicus Programme, NOAA's Hurricane Research Division, Brown University, Cornell University, and Duke University. Ancillary tables link to observational platforms such as the National Data Buoy Center, Buoy 42001, Reconnaissance aircraft, Hurricane Hunters, NEXRAD radar installations, and Argos float data. The archive spans from the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation-era records through contemporary seasons including Hurricane Sandy (2012), Hurricane Maria (2017), and Hurricane Dorian (2019).
Best Track values derive from post-season reanalysis combining inputs from satellite remote sensing (e.g., GOES-East, Meteosat), in situ observations from NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer, surface networks, reconnaissance flight data collected by the 402d Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, and pressure–wind relationships such as the Atkinson–Holliday method and the Saffir–Simpson scale for classification. Quality control protocols involve interagency review panels with scientists from NOAA, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and university research groups, employing statistical tests used by centers like the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and data assimilation schemes implemented at ECMWF and NCEP. Reanalyses have been published in journals including the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Geophysical Research Letters, and Journal of Climate.
Practitioners in coastal engineering firms, insurers such as Allstate and Munich Re, and planners in jurisdictions like New York City and Miami-Dade County use Best Track for hazard assessments, storm surge modeling with tools linked to FEMA maps, and catastrophe modeling by RMS and AIR Worldwide. Climate scientists in projects supported by the National Science Foundation and the European Research Council use HURDAT to study trends related to El Niño–Southern Oscillation, Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and anthropogenic forcing examined by the IPCC. Operational forecasters at NOAA Weather Prediction Center and Central Pacific Hurricane Center use historical tracks for analog forecasting and model verification.
Critics note spatiotemporal inhomogeneities due to changes in observational networks, from sparse 19th-century ship logs to modern satellite constellations like GOES and Sentinel-3, leading to biases discussed in studies from Harvard University, Yale University, and University of Oxford. The dataset's reliance on post-storm subjective analysis by human analysts has prompted comparisons to automated reanalysis systems at ECMWF and machine learning efforts from Google DeepMind collaborators. Policy analysts in agencies such as the U.S. Government Accountability Office and academics in University of California, Berkeley highlight issues with uncertainty quantification and the need for standardized error metrics similar to those adopted by the International Panel on Climate Change assessments.
Comparable or complementary archives include the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS), the Joint Typhoon Warning Center datasets for the Western Pacific Ocean, the Digital Typhoon database, and paleotempestology reconstructions held by the NOAA Paleoclimatology Program and the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory. Model output archives from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project and observational products from TRMM, GPM, MODIS, and SeaWiFS are often used in tandem with HURDAT for attribution studies, vulnerability assessments, and historical climatology comparisons by institutions including Princeton University, MIT, Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Category:Meteorological data sets