Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Hurricane RSS Feeds

The National Hurricane Center has created two very helpful feeds for those who want to know the latest GIS hurricane data:

  • Atlantic Feed: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/gis-at.xml
  • Pacific Feed: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/gis-ep.xml
Each feed contains a wealth of information that can be parsed out:

  • Graphical Tropical Weather Outlook [shp]
  • 120h Wind Speed Probabilities (34kt, 50kt, 64kt) [shp] [kml]
  • Advisory Summary Information [xml]
  • Advisory Forecast Track [shp] [kml]
  • Advisory Cone of Uncertainty [shp] [kml]
  • Advisory Watches & Warnings [shp] [kml]
  • Advisory Wind Field [shp]
  • Preliminary Best Track [shp] [kml] & Wind Swath [shp]
  • Storm Surge (Probabilities, Exceedance) [shp] [kml]
shp means shapefile (in zip files) and kml is keyhole markup language (google format). 

This is a great improvement over the old way of trying to automate pulling data from the National Hurricane Center's website.  Hopefully next year they will improve these feeds by offering JSON or GeoJSON formats like the USGS has for new real time Earthquake data.