This article was accepted into the corpus but its outbound wikilinks were never NER-processed — typical at the deepest BFS hop or when the run's entity cap was reached. No expansion funnel to show.
| Hurricane Database (HURDAT) | |
|---|---|
| Name | Hurricane Database (HURDAT) |
| Developer | National Hurricane Center, NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration |
| Initial release | 1965 |
| Latest release | ongoing reanalysis updates |
| Format | plain text, digital archives |
| Coverage | Atlantic basin, Eastern Pacific basin |
| License | public domain (United States) |
Hurricane Database (HURDAT) is the authoritative archived dataset for tropical cyclones in the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific maintained by the National Hurricane Center, NOAA, and affiliated agencies. It provides historical best-track positions, intensities, and metadata used by researchers at institutions such as the National Weather Service, NASA, and the United States Navy for climatology, risk assessment, and operational forecasting. HURDAT informs analyses by organizations including the World Meteorological Organization, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and academic centers like Columbia University, Princeton University, and University of Miami.
HURDAT catalogs tropical cyclones with entries for tropical depressions, tropical storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes affecting basins monitored by the National Hurricane Center and the Central Pacific Hurricane Center. The dataset underpins work at agencies and institutions like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, and NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. HURDAT supports modeling by centers such as NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, and informs industry stakeholders including Lloyd's of London, Aon, and Swiss Re.
HURDAT traces its origins to post-World War II meteorological efforts led by the United States Weather Bureau and later consolidated by the National Hurricane Research Project and the National Hurricane Center. Historical expansion involved collaborations with the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, Hurricane Research Division, and international partners like the UK Met Office and Plymouth Marine Laboratory. Major milestones include digitization initiatives with support from NOAA leadership, methodological updates influenced by studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and retrospective reanalyses coordinated with the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship and university consortia.
Entries in HURDAT include time-stamped best-track positions (latitude, longitude), maximum sustained wind, minimum central pressure, storm status, and quality-control flags. The plain-text format is structured for ingestion by modeling frameworks used at National Center for Atmospheric Research, European Space Agency, Canadian Hurricane Centre, and research groups at Florida State University and University of Oxford. Supplemental metadata links storm entries to reconnaissance missions by NOAA Hurricane Hunters, United States Air Force Reserve squadrons, satellite analyses from GOES and MODIS, and ship reports cataloged by the International Maritime Organization.
HURDAT’s methodology integrates observations from surface stations, reconnaissance aircraft, satellite imagery, buoy networks, and reanalysis projects such as ERA5 and 20th Century Reanalysis. Reanalysis efforts involve researchers at NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory, University of Colorado Boulder, and University of Reading. Collaborative studies by teams at Yale University, University of Arizona, Pennsylvania State University, and Texas A&M University have refined intensity estimates using techniques from Dvorak technique adaptations, dropsonde data interpretation, and ensemble assimilation methods developed for centers like ECMWF.
HURDAT is used for hurricane climatology, risk modeling, emergency planning, insurance underwriting, and climate change attribution analyses. Academic research incorporating HURDAT spans institutions such as Harvard University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, and Georgetown University, while operational forecasting systems at NOAA Weather Prediction Center and National Weather Service incorporate HURDAT-based statistics. The dataset supports infrastructure resilience projects undertaken by United States Army Corps of Engineers, urban planners in cities like Miami, New Orleans, and Tampa, and international disaster agencies such as United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.
Critiques of HURDAT address historical observational gaps, underestimation of early twentieth-century intensities, and inconsistencies identified by researchers at University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, Rutgers University, and Duke University. Limitations stem from sparse ship reports, incomplete aircraft reconnaissance before the 1940s, and satellite-era inhomogeneities noted by analysts at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and National Climatic Data Center. Debates involving scholars from Cornell University, University of Washington, and Brown University emphasize uncertainty quantification, bias correction, and the need for integration with global reanalysis products like MERRA-2.
HURDAT is publicly accessible through portals maintained by NOAA and is distributed in formats consumable by community tools used at GitHub, Zenodo, and institutional repositories at NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. Data products derived from HURDAT include climatological atlases, risk maps used by Aon Benfield, and time-series datasets employed in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Researchers and emergency managers from agencies such as Federal Emergency Management Agency, Department of Homeland Security, and universities compile HURDAT with observational archives from National Snow and Ice Data Center, NOAA's National Data Buoy Center, and satellite archives curated by NASA.
Category:Meteorological databases