User talk:Supportstorm

Welcome to Wikimedia Commons, Supportstorm!

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GIS tornado track data source

Hi Storm,

I'm working on maps of tornado tracks in the U.S. for years prior to 2018 (where your excellent maps begin), and I was curious about where your precise tornado tracks come from. I'm currently using the 1950–2022 tornado paths shapefile from https://www.spc.noaa.gov/gis/svrgis/, which displays all paths as straight lines between the start and end points. I notice your tracks actually correspond to the true tornado paths shown on the Damage Assessment Toolkit, but seem to include tornadoes that aren't present on there. If your data source is public and shareable I would love to use it for the pre-2018 maps!

Best, Penitentes (talk) 17:27, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

Hi! The data I use is curated with many different sources, so there's no one GIS dataset you can pull off the internet. The DAT will get you most of the detailed tracks but not all and is missing many tracks as you mention. NCEI/SPC is full of errors that I have to cross-reference and coordinate changes with NCEI when possible, not to mention that landspout tornadoes are sometimes grouped under SVR thunderstorm wind events. I also add a significant amount of metadata to each tornado so that it may be used on the TornadoArchive and my research, which is the main reason I'm slow at updating maps. Your maps look really clean though! Encourages me to spend more time making my maps look nicer when I get a chance. Supportstorm (talk) 13:25, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply! I spent ages trying to compare DAT/Tornado Archive/SPC databases for any given year to see whether one of them was all-inclusive and eventually came to the conclusion that you must be doing some good synthesis. I hadn't been aware before of how much work you were doing to clean and assemble that data, so I take my hat off to you. We're very lucky to have you adding this value to Wikipedia! Penitentes (talk) 14:52, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

Oh thanks! It's a bit of work yes. Hopefully with DAT being integrated with NCEI storm data "soonish", we'll have most offices inputting all their tornado tracks in there, making this task way easier. Supportstorm (talk) 20:24, 21 June 2024 (UTC)