Hurricane / Tropical-Cyclone Study Arc — Data Sources
Status: active arc · Opened: 2026-06-09 · Owner: Mike + Claude (content development)
This is a raw-data arc. We are explicitly not running or comparing cyclone forecast models. The weather services own evacuation and warning. We study the physical fingerprint a storm leaves in instruments that are not weather instruments — rivers, tide gauges, lightning networks, seismometers, the ocean itself — across the full lifecycle: forming → intensifying → peak → weakening → post-storm.
Working principle for this arc: we fill data gaps to make a paper work; we do not drop a paper because a feed isn't wired up yet. Every "needed but not yet ingested" source below is a candidate fetcher, not a reason to abandon the idea.
Taxonomy reference: each paper is tagged by the two axes (data velocity × window type) from
docs/paper-taxonomy.md.
Are all tropical-cyclone seasons the same? (the seed fact)
No. Each basin runs its own calendar, and the hemispheres are ~6 months out of phase, so there is almost always an active season somewhere:
| Basin | Season | Peak | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| North Atlantic | Jun 1 – Nov 30 | ~Sep 10 | The "hurricane season" everyone means |
| Eastern Pacific | May 15 – Nov 30 | ~Aug–Sep | Starts two weeks earlier than Atlantic |
| Western Pacific (typhoons) | no official bounds; year-round | Jul–Oct | Busiest basin on Earth (~⅓ of global TCs) |
| North Indian | bimodal: Apr–Jun and Oct–Dec | May, Nov | Summer monsoon shears the mid-season dead patch |
| Southern Hemisphere (S Indian / Australian / S Pacific) | Nov – Apr | Feb–Mar | ~6 months out of phase with the NH |
| South Atlantic | effectively none | — | One famous storm: Catarina, Mar 2004 |
The closest thing to a true global lull is roughly May. This fact is the basis of Paper 1.
The papers in this arc
P1 — Global season-phase monitor (open / standing-monitor · slow velocity)
Question: Where on Earth is tropical-cyclone activity at any moment? Quantify the hemispheric 6-month offset, the North Indian double peak, and whether a truly storm-free day ever happens. Status: fully sourceable today (IBTrACS is live back to 1842). Second entry in the open/standing-monitor quadrant after the Starlink pilot.
P2 — Freshwater pulse: the landfall water budget (closed window per storm · slow velocity)
Question: What is the lag from landfall to river crest, and the total streamflow anomaly a storm injects into a basin? US-coast story (no global river feed). Status: sourceable today (USGS streamflow + Open-Meteo flood, both live).
P3 — Barometric & surge autopsy (closed window per storm · medium velocity)
Question: The raw pressure-minimum trace through a storm's life, and the surge footprint it stamps on the coast. Tide gauges and offshore buoys are the ground truth. Status: mostly live (Open-Meteo pressure + NOAA tides). Add NDBC buoys for in-situ core measurements.
P4 — Lightning as a rapid-intensification tell (closed-or-open · fast velocity)
Question: Does a burst of eyewall lightning precede intensification? An open question in the literature, attackable with raw strike data. Status: live going forward (Blitzortung, but only ~7 weeks of history as of 2026-06-09). Add GOES GLM for satellite-side eyewall mapping and pre-April retrospective.
P5 — Hearing the hurricane (microseism) (closed-or-open · fast velocity)
Question: A storm churning the ocean generates secondary microseisms (~0.1–0.35 Hz) that show up on seismometers hundreds of miles inland. Can we watch a hurricane's "hum" rise and fall on a seismograph, and correlate it with wave height and storm distance? Status: needs a new seismic feed. We have earthquake catalogs, not the continuous ground-motion trace this requires. This is the one paper gated on a new fetcher — and the one we most want.
Cross-cutting fuel & confound layers
Used as supporting layers across P1–P5: sea-surface temperature (the fuel), ocean heat content (rapid-intensification fuel), the Saharan Air Layer (Atlantic suppression), and scatterometer ocean winds (raw surface wind under the storm).
Sources already live in TerraPulse (no work needed)
| Source (slug) | Gives us | Coverage (as of 2026-06-09) | Used by |
|---|---|---|---|
ibtracs_hurricanes |
Global best-track positions + intensity, every basin | 1842 → present, 815k recs | P1, P4, P5 |
usgs_water |
US streamflow / river stage | Sep 2025 → present, 2.7M obs | P2 |
open_meteo_flood |
Modeled river discharge | Mar 2026 → present | P2 |
open_meteo |
Surface pressure, wind, precip (point) | Sep 2025 → present | P3 |
noaa_tides |
Tide-gauge water level → storm surge | Sep 2025 → present, 365k obs | P3 |
open_meteo_marine |
Significant wave height, sea state | Sep 2025 → present | P3, P5 |
blitzortung_lightning |
Ground-network lightning strikes | Apr 20 2026 → present, 21M strikes | P4 |
igra_soundings |
Upper-air profiles (shear, structure) | 2024 → present | P3 (context) |
nws_alerts |
US watches/warnings (context only) | 2021 → present | context |
Sources to add (gap-fill, by priority)
URLs are canonical, free, and no-auth unless noted. Each row is a candidate fetcher.
Tier 1 — unlocks a gated paper
| Need | Source | URL | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seismic noise PSD (microseism band) | IRIS MUSTANG noise-psd / noise-pdf metrics |
https://service.iris.edu/mustang/ | Cheap path — pre-computed power spectral density per station/day; no waveform crunching. The 0.1–0.35 Hz band is the secondary microseism. Unlocks P5. |
| Raw seismic waveforms (BHZ vertical) | IRIS/FDSN dataselect web service |
https://service.iris.edu/fdsnws/dataselect/1/ | If we want to compute the PSD ourselves at higher cadence. Station metadata: https://service.iris.edu/fdsnws/station/1/ |
| Station discovery across networks | FDSN federated catalog | https://service.iris.edu/irisws/fedcatalog/1/ | Find inland broadband stations near US coasts for P5. |
Tier 2 — strengthens P3/P4 and the live-season story
| Need | Source | URL | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| In-situ ocean pressure/wind/wave (storm core) | NOAA NDBC buoys (realtime2) | https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/data/realtime2/ | Buoys literally inside the storm; often the closest direct measurement. Station list: https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/to_station.shtml |
| Satellite lightning (GLM) | NOAA GOES-16/18 GLM on AWS Open Data | https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-goes/ | Global, maps eyewall vs rainband lightning; covers the pre-April-2026 gap Blitzortung can't. |
| Live current-storm positions (best-track lags) | NHC CurrentStorms feed | https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/CurrentStorms.json | Atlantic + E Pacific real-time advisories/positions. GIS: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/gis/ |
| W Pacific / S Hemisphere live warnings | Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) | https://www.metoc.navy.mil/jtwc/jtwc.html | Products: https://www.metoc.navy.mil/jtwc/products/ — fills the basins NHC doesn't cover. |
| Finer coastal surge / water level | NOAA CO-OPS API | https://api.tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/api/prod/ | Higher-resolution companion to noaa_tides. |
Tier 3 — fuel & confound layers (cross-cutting)
| Need | Source | URL | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sea-surface temperature (the fuel) | NOAA OISST v2.1 | https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/optimum-interpolation-sst | Daily 0.25° global SST. The energy source for intensification. |
| Ocean heat content / thermal stress | NOAA Coral Reef Watch | https://coralreefwatch.noaa.gov/product/ | Sub-surface heat available to a storm; rapid-intensification predictor. |
| Subsurface ocean heat profiles | Argo float network | https://data-argo.ifremer.fr/ | In-situ temperature/salinity vs depth ahead of a storm track. |
| Scatterometer ocean surface wind | NOAA/NESDIS ocean winds (ASCAT) | https://manati.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/ | Raw surface wind field under the storm. KNMI mirror: https://scatterometer.knmi.nl/ |
| Saharan Air Layer (Atlantic suppression) | CIMSS tropical / SAL split-window | https://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/sal/ | Mostly imagery; ingest as a qualitative confound layer for Atlantic papers. |
Notes & honest limits
- Lightning history is shallow: Blitzortung starts 2026-04-20. Any retrospective on earlier 2026 storms needs GLM (Tier 2).
- River/surge signals are US-only: USGS water, NOAA tides, NDBC, CO-OPS all cover US waters. P2 and P3 are US-coast stories unless we add foreign hydrology feeds.
- IBTrACS lags for the live storm: best-track is provisional for the current system; pair with NHC/JTWC (Tier 2) for true real-time intensity.
- Microseism is the one hard gate: P5 cannot start until the IRIS/FDSN feed (Tier 1) is wired. Everything else in this arc is doable with what's live or a light Tier-2 add.