National Hurricane Center Forecast Tracks WMS

A prototype Web Map Service containing NOAA National Hurricane Center forecast information for Atlantic and Pacific basins. The data layers include forecast tracks, official forecast positions (points), probable tracks with uncertainty (cones of uncertainty), and associated hurricane and tropical storm watches and warnings line segments. Also included is a tropical outlook layer with areas depicting probable tropical cyclone formation. The service includes two sets of layers for each of the data types (forecast track, forecast points, cone of uncertainty, and watches/warnings), as well as the tropical outlook layer 'tropical_outlook'). The first set of layers (nhc_forecast_track, nhc_forecast_points, nhc_forecast_cone, nhc_forecast_watches_warnings) displays only data for currently 'active' tropical storms for both Atlantic and Pacific basins. The second set contains WMS 1.3.0 time-enabled representations that support animation over currently active storm information as well as past storm information dating back to 2011. These layers are named: nhc_forecast_track_time, nhc_forecast_points_time, nhc_forecast_cone_time, nhc_forecast_watches_warnings_time. A client that supports the WMS 1.3.0 time dimension can animate through these data layers over time. Detailed descriptions for the data layers follow. Forecast Points represent the official NHC forecast position of the tropical cyclone. Forecast Tracks are the Forecast Points connected by a line segment Forecast Cones represents the probable track of the center of a tropical cyclone, and is formed by enclosing the area swept out by a set of circles along the forecast track (at 12, 24, 36 hours, etc). The size of each circle is set so that two-thirds of historical official forecast errors over a 5-year sample fall within the circle. Based on forecasts over the previous 5 years, the entire track of a tropical cyclone can be expected to remain within the cone roughly 60-70% of the time. It is important to note that the area affected by a tropical cyclone can extend well beyond the confines of the cone enclosing the most likely track area of the center. Source data can be downloaded from the National Hurricane Center here: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/gis/ This is a prototype service available on NOAA's Open Geospatial Consortium shared hosting service. The hosting system is monitored for uptime and is geographically distributed in a high-availability architecture with two mirrored nodes. However, it should not be relied upon for 24 x 7 uptime for emergency response.

Available map layers (6)

There are currently no notifications for the service, click the feed icon to subscribe.