Archived hurricane data

[OKpowdah]

I'm basically looking for something very similar to weather.unisys

I'm trying to read in those files using perl, but for whatever reason it's not liking the .dat extension on the webpage.

So for instance, I'm trying to read in http://www.weather.unisys.com/hurricane/atlantic/1981/ARLENE/track.dat

But it's rejected all of my attempts.

Otherwise, weather.unisys is perfect, so if someone can help me with the perl...

Thanks!!

[OKpowdah]

As a follow-up, if anyone knows a database of daily ACE by storm or basin, that would be awesome too

[HurricaneJosh]

Actually, the Unisys database is usually out of date and never seems to reflect the latest, reanalyzed data. I don't know why everyone uses it for research. Get the data straight from HURDAT.

[Juliancolton]

I don't know if this is what you mean, or if you've tried it already, but "easyread" hurdat (http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/easyread-2010.html) is much easier to read and put to use than the raw original hurdat file. It's exactly like the original, but simply translated to a much more basic format.

[HurricaneJosh]

I don't know if this is what you mean, or if you've tried it already, but "easyread" hurdat (http://www.aoml.noaa...yread-2010.html) is much easier to read and put to use than the raw original hurdat file. It's exactly like the original, but simply translated to a much more basic format.

And the other benefit is that these data are correct and up-to-date.

[OKpowdah]

Thanks guys! I could be able to work with that easier too.

Is there an equivalent for the E and W Pacific basins?

[wxmx]

I've already dumped the hurdat (and IBTrACS) data to a mysql database, which would make the data very easy to manage, for ACE or any other stuff. If you want the database or if you just want the ACE data, just PM me with what exactly you want and I might be able to send you an excel spreadsheet or something like it.

[wxmx]

Thanks guys! I could be able to work with that easier too.

Is there an equivalent for the E and W Pacific basins?

There's hurdat for the EPac...and IBTrACS for the rest of the world.

[wxmx]

One thing...if you want the data for a script (PERL or other), use the normal hurdat file, not the easy to read...it's easier to parse and has data that can't be found in the easy to read format.

[OKpowdah]

One thing...if you want the data for a script (PERL or other), use the normal hurdat file, not the easy to read...it's easier to parse and has data that can't be found in the easy to read format.

I just noted that too. Thanks

[OKpowdah]

There's hurdat for the EPac...and IBTrACS for the rest of the world.

Thanks. Do you know of a site that I can pull 6 hourly or daily data from IBTrACS?

[wxmx]

Thanks. Do you know of a site that I can pull 6 hourly or daily data from IBTrACS?

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ibtracs/index.php?name=ibtracs-data

[wxmx]

For the hurdat parsing, you can use the unpack function in PERL, I think it works similarly to the one in PHP... a snippet of the code in PHP

$fields = unpack('A6SeqNum1/A11StartDate/A2M/A3StormDays/A3StormNum/A5SNBR/A5TotalStormNum/A12StormName/A5XING/A2HitUS/A4SSS/A1HitUSCat/A20Padding/A1LastStorm',$s);
$fields_StartDate=explode('/',trim($fields["StartDate"]));
$year=$fields_StartDate[2];
$start_date=$year.$fields_StartDate[0].$fields_StartDate[1];
$storm_days=trim($fields["StormDays"]);
$total_storm_num=trim($fields["TotalStormNum"]);
$storm_num=trim($fields["StormNum"]);
$storm_name=trim($fields["StormName"]);
$hit_US=trim($fields["HitUS"]);
$hit_US_cat=$fields["HitUSCat"];
$last_storm=$fields["LastStorm"]=='L'?1:0;

You can check the full code on http://db.hellohelp.net/hurdat_storms/storm_search.php (parse_hurdat.php)

[OKpowdah]

I've already dumped the hurdat (and IBTrACS) data to a mysql database, which would make the data very easy to manage, for ACE or any other stuff. If you want the database or if you just want the ACE data, just PM me with what exactly you want and I might be able to send you an excel spreadsheet or something like it.

I just saw this post lol. Sending you a PM now.