Legacy Archive
HWind was originally developed within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Hurricane Research Division, a part of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratories, in Miami, Florida. HWind was the result of many years of research supported with public funds from various competitive research programs within NOAA. These funds helped to support an innovative program of real-time and historical hurricane wind analysis, resulting in a legacy archive of data products for more than 200 storms through 2013.
As a public service to the research and business community, RMS is hosting the HWind legacy archive. All data Is free and open to the public.
Notes on the HWind Legacy Archive
- Data reflects observations captured in real-time as the storm evolved, and post-event
- Available data formats are listed below. The number and type of files varies by storm.
- Map - Image of wind field size and intensity for a given time. Available at different zoom levels and domain sizes.
- Data coverage plots - Image showing data sources used to inform files for a given time.
- Gridded hazard data - File representing wind conditions over a gridded domain for a given time. More information on this format can be found here.
- Shapefiles - Mapping file reflecting wind conditions on a point grid.
- Metadata - XML file with additional information about data.
- Methods used to conduct data analyses have evolved over time.
- Grid spacing is on the order of 6 km and maximum domain size varies but is typically 8 x 8 degrees.
- There are known errors in some of the data coverage, mapping. and gridded products. Please contact support@rms.com with any questions.
- If intending to use the legacy archive data for storm surge and wave modeling, it is recommended that wind speeds be converted from a maximum 1-minute sustained wind speed to at least a ten minute (or longer) mean wind speed. This conversion better reflects how the ocean and wave profiles respond to winds. For more information, please refer to the list of peer-reviewed HWind citations.
- Most analyses were conducted in real-time. As a result, the storm positions are typically extrapolated from earlier data and therefore not accurate
