User:Seddon69/HURDAT
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The North Atlantic hurricane database, or HURDAT, is the database for all tropical storms and hurricanes for the Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea, including those that have made landfall in the United States.
Contents |
[edit] History
The original database of six-hourly positions and intensities were put together in the 1960s in support of the Apollo space program to help provide statistical track forecast guidance. In the intervening years, this database - which is now freely and easily accessible on the Internet from the National Hurricane Center's (NHC's) Webpage - has been utilized for a wide variety of uses: climatic change studies, seasonal forecasting, risk assessment for county emergency managers, analysis of potential losses for insurance and business interests, intensity forecasting techniques and verification of official and various model predictions of track and intensity.
HURDAT was not designed with all of these uses in mind when it was first put together and not all of them may be appropriate given its original motivation. One problem with HURDAT is that there are numerous systematic as sell as some random errors in the database which need correction. Additionally, analysis techniques have changed over the years at NHC as our understanding of tropical cyclones has developed, leading to biases in the historical database that have not been addressed. Another difficulty in applying the hurricane database to studies concerned with landfalling events is the lack exact location, time and intensity at hurricane landfall.
[edit] Re-analysis Project
HURDAT has been updated significantly only twice before. The first time was in 2001 when data for years 1851 to 1885 were added to the database. The second time was August 2002 when Hurricane Andrew was upgraded to a Category 5. Recent efforts into uncovering undocumented historical hurricanes in the late 1800s and early 1900s led by Jose Fernandez-Partagas have greatly increased our knowledge of these past events, which are not yet incorporated into the HURDAT database. Because of all of these issues, a re-analysis of the Atlantic hurricane database is being attempted that will be completed in three years.
In addition to the groundbreaking work by Partagas, additional analyses, digitization and quality control of the data was carried out by researchers at the NOAA Hurricane Research Division funded by the NOAA Office of Global Programs. Over the next two years, this re-analysis will continue to progress through the remainder of the 20th Century. [1] [2]
Over 5000 additions and alterations are now approved for the 1851 to 1910 era by the National Hurricane Center's Best Track Change Committee. (This same process was utilized for the upgrade of 1992's Hurricane Andrew to a Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale last August.) This work on historical hurricanes was originally conducted by the late Jose Fernandez Partagas. Additional analyses, digitization and quality control of the data was carried out by researchers at the NOAA Hurricane Research Division funded by NOAA Office of Global Programs. Over the next two years, this re-analysis will continue to progress through the remainder of the 20th Century.
Official changes to the Atlantic hurricane database are approved by the National Hurricane Center Best Track Change Committee. Thus research conducted by Chris Landsea and colleagues as part of the Atlantic hurricane database reanalysis project likewise goes through this review process. Not all Landsea's recommendations are accepted by the Committee.
[edit] Data
There are seven files that make up the Re-Analysis project:
- The revised Atlantic HURDAT: This contains six-hourly intensity (maximum sustained 1-minute winds at the surface [10 m] and, when available, central pressures) and position (to the nearest 0.1 degree latitude and longitude) estimates of all known tropical storms and hurricanes. This file also contains direction of movement in degrees and speed (mph and kph).
- A HURDAT metafile: This documentation file has detailed information about each change in the revised HURDAT. Included are the original HURDAT values of position and/or intensity, the revised values in HURDAT, and the reasoning behind the changes. Format is in text form.
- A "center fix" file: A file has been created that is composed of raw observations of tropical cyclone positions (thus center fixes) and intensity measurements from either ships or coastal stations.
- A U.S. landfalling tropical storm and hurricane database: This file contains information on the exact time, location, intensity, radius of maximum winds (RMW), environmental sea level pressure and storm surge for continental U.S. landfalling (and those whose centers do not make landfall, but do impact land) tropical storms and hurricanes.
- NHC Best Track Change Committee comments: This file provides detailed comments from the NHC Best Track Change Committee - a group tasked with approving alterations to the HURDAT database. replies by the authors to the various comments and recommendations are also included.
- A Re-analysis of Hurricane Andrew's (1992) Intensity: This file contains thepreliminary estimates of Hurricane Andrew's intensities, the changes made in detail and the reasons why they were made.
- The San Diego Hurricane of October 2, 1858: This file contains comprehesive information of a hurricane that directly impacted San Diego nearly 150 years ago. This includes data sources, newspaper accounts, observations and damage reports.
