Remote Access of National Hurricane Center Storm Tracks and Storm Prediction Center Storm Reports with Siphon

Siphon is a data access Python library developed and maintained by the Unidata Program Center, part of the UCAR Community Programs. Initially, Siphon was created to enable students and researchers to easily retrieve data hosted on Thematic Realtime Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS) Data Servers. Recent development of Siphon has emphasized access to online datasets other than those hosted on a TDS. As part of the 2019 Unidata Summer Internship, Siphon was extended to access data held by the National Hurricane Center (including hurricane tracks and model forecasts from 1851 to the current year) and the Storm Prediction Center’s Storm Report archive. In an effort to facilitate user interaction with these servers, Jupyter notebook-based Graphic User Interfaces (GUIs) have been designed to visualize the data and are available through Unidata. Applications of this functionality will be discussed and demonstrated during this presentation.