Evaluation of the NCEI Storm Events and SHELDUS Databases for Damages across Southeast Texas

As weather extremes become more frequent, it is important to properly communicate storm reports for planning efforts. Currently, there are two datasets that hold these archived reports: Storm Events Database and SHELDUS (Spatial Hazardous Events and Losses Database for the United States). The Storm Events Database, maintained by the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), contains data such as storm reports, event narratives, and damage details from January 1950 to March 2024. Similarly, the SHELDUS Database, hosted by Arizona State University, is a county-level hazard dataset containing storm reports, damage details, and fatalities/injuries for 1960 to the present. While both of these county-level databases are expansive, the quality of storm reports can be inconsistent. We closely examined storm reports from 2000 through 2023 for seven southeast Texas counties (Chambers, Galveston, Hardin, Houston, Jefferson, Liberty, and Orange), including a mix of urban and rural counties and multiple National Weather Service (NWS) County Warning Areas, to determine the incidence of duplicate entries and spatial or temporal inconsistencies. Files of potential duplicates were made and then manually investigated to determine the uniqueness of the report. Visual inspection of data using QGIS maps, time series/bar graphs, and descriptive statistics, showed a large spatiotemporal variation of storm reports were found across the Southeast Texas counties. Interviews conducted with the NWS Offices in Houston, TX and Lake Charles, LA reflected that there is no designated standard for how storm events are reported. This research suggests that NWS offices should standardize the practice of storm/damage reports to ensure accuracy and consistency across offices and improve assessments of extreme weather risk at the local and regional levels.