NEXRAD Severe Weather Signatures in the NOAA Severe Weather Data Inventory

The Severe Weather Data Inventory (SWDI) at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) provides user access to archives of several datasets critical to the detection and evaluation of severe weather. These datasets include

• NEXRAD Level-III point features describing general storm structure, hail, mesocyclone and tornado signatures from 1995 to present. Current number of features in SWDI (January 1995 - April 2009, with product codes in parentheses):

- Storm Structure (NSS): 254,923,000

- Mesocyclone (NME): 19,136,000

- Digital Mesocyclone (NMD): 2,134,000

- Hail (NHI): 93,136,880

- Tornado Vortex Signature (NTV): 348,000

• NOAA's National Weather Service Storm Events Database

• NOAA's National Weather Service Preliminary Local Storm Reports collected from storm spotters

• NOAA's National Weather Service Watches and Warnings

• Lightning strikes from Vaisala's National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN) (.gov and .mil only)

SWDI stores these datasets in a spatial database that allows for convenient searching and subsetting. These data are accessible via the NCDC web site, FTP or automated web services. The results of interactive web page queries may be saved in a variety of formats, including plain text, XML, Google Earth's KMZ and Shapefile. In the future, the SWDI platform may be utilized for algorithm output from reanalysis and data mining projects in addition to simple quality control flags based on queries such as “Select all tornado signatures within a severe thunderstorm warning (spatially and temporally)”.