This paper will describe the process going into the development of a recent tropical cyclone rainfall database for the United States. A climatology such as this has not been worked on by this office since 1955, and there does not appear to be a single source providing such information, thus work began on a local database in 1999, and continues to this day. So far, data from October 1995 is fairly complete...much of it being in graphical form, with slow but steady entry into a Quattro Pro format for later analysis.

This work has been done solely by the author, and has taken a couple years to get to this point. Enough information has been gleaned to make some preliminary findings, which will be discussed in the presentation. Also, patterns relating to rainfall surrounding tropical cyclones....there appear to be three main ones...will be discussed, along with where the maxima appear with each pattern. Discussion of extremes with each cyclone will also be shown, which is two times higher than seen in older studies, mainly due to the expansion of the cooperative data network stored at NCDC.