Silurian/nexrad-storm-catalog

NEXRAD Storm Catalog

A metadata index pairing storm events from the NOAA Storm Events Database with nearby NEXRAD WSR-88D weather-radar stations. Each row is one (event, station) pair where the station was within 150 km of the event location, scoped to 2015–2024.

This catalog is metadata only. It does not contain reflectivity, velocity, or any other radar payloads — it points at radar windows so a downstream pipeline can fetch the matching Level-2 volumes from the Unidata NEXRAD Level-2 archive on AWS Open Data (s3://unidata-nexrad-level2/).

Files

File	Rows	Size	Description
nexrad_event_catalog.parquet	583,674	~70 MB	Storm event ↔ station pairs
nexrad_stations.csv	158	~7 KB	WSR-88D station metadata
LICENSE	—	—	Apache License 2.0
README.md	—	—	This file

Schema — nexrad_event_catalog.parquet

Column	Type	Description
station_id	str	WSR-88D station identifier (e.g. KTLX, KABR)
event_id	int	NOAA Storm Events identifier
event_type	str	One of 17 storm types (Thunderstorm Wind, Hail, Flash Flood, Flood, Winter Storm, Heavy Snow, Tornado, Heavy Rain, Blizzard, Tropical Storm, Lightning, Funnel Cloud, Ice Storm, Waterspout, Lake-Effect Snow, Dust Storm, Hurricane (Typhoon))
category	str	Coarse 7-way grouping: severe_wind, hail, tornado, rain_flood, winter, hurricane_tropical, other
ef_scale	str | null	EF rating for tornado events
begin_datetime_utc	datetime[UTC]	Event start time
end_datetime_utc	datetime[UTC]	Event end time
distance_km	float	Great-circle distance from station to event location
begin_lat	float	Event latitude (degrees)
begin_lon	float	Event longitude (degrees)
state	str	US state / territory code
magnitude	float | null	Event magnitude (units depend on magnitude_type)
magnitude_type	str | null	Magnitude units / scale
episode_narrative	str	Free-text NWS narrative for the surrounding episode

Category mapping

Category	Event types	Row count
severe_wind	Thunderstorm Wind	250,014
rain_flood	Flash Flood, Flood, Heavy Rain	114,761
hail	Hail	111,569
winter	Winter Storm, Heavy Snow, Blizzard, Ice Storm, Lake-Effect Snow	68,795
tornado	Tornado	21,551
other	Waterspout, Lightning, Funnel Cloud, Dust Storm	11,529
hurricane_tropical	Tropical Storm, Hurricane (Typhoon)	5,455

Schema — nexrad_stations.csv

Column	Type	Description
station_id	str	WSR-88D station identifier — matches station_id in the events table
name	str	Human-readable site name (e.g. Lake Charles, El Paso)
lat	float	Station latitude (degrees)
lon	float	Station longitude (degrees)
elevation_m	float	Antenna elevation above sea level (metres)
state	str | null	US state / territory code, where available
rda_type	str | null	Radar Data Acquisition unit type, where available

Coverage: 158 NEXRAD WSR-88D sites across the United States and territories.

Quick start

import pandas as pd

events = pd.read_parquet(
    "hf://datasets/Silurian/nexrad-storm-catalog/nexrad_event_catalog.parquet"
)
stations = pd.read_csv(
    "hf://datasets/Silurian/nexrad-storm-catalog/nexrad_stations.csv"
)

print(events.shape)               # (583674, 14)
print(events["category"].value_counts())

Filter to a single category, station, and year:

ktlx_tornadoes_2019 = events[
    (events["station_id"] == "KTLX")
    & (events["event_type"] == "Tornado")
    & (events["begin_datetime_utc"].dt.year == 2019)
]

How the catalog was built

1. Download the NOAA Storm Events Database bulk CSVs (2015–2024) from https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/swdi/stormevents/csvfiles/.
2. Join each storm event to all WSR-88D stations within 150 km, using a great-circle distance computed against the station coordinates in nexrad_stations.csv.
3. Map each event_type into the 6-way category field per the table above (events whose type is not in any explicit bucket are tagged general).

Provenance & credits

• Storm event records — NOAA Storm Events Database, US-government public-domain data published by NOAA NCEI.
• WSR-88D station metadata — NOAA National Weather Service, Radar Operations Center.
• Underlying radar volumes (not redistributed here) — NOAA NEXRAD Level-2 on AWS Open Data, hosted by Unidata: s3://unidata-nexrad-level2/.
• Catalog assembly, categorisation, and packaging — Silurian AI.

Citation

If you use this catalog, please cite both the upstream NOAA source and this packaged release.

@misc{silurian_nexrad_storm_catalog_2026,
  title  = {NEXRAD Storm Catalog},
  author = {{Silurian AI}},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/Silurian/nexrad-storm-catalog}
}

@misc{noaa_storm_events,
  title  = {NOAA Storm Events Database},
  author = {{National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Centers for Environmental Information}},
  url    = {https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/}
}

License

This catalog is released under the Apache License 2.0 — see the bundled LICENSE file for the full text.

The upstream NOAA Storm Events records are US-government public-domain data; the Apache 2.0 license here covers the value-add layer (the join to WSR-88D stations, the category mapping, and the packaged distribution).