The storm desk · the National Hurricane Center, read live
What the Center
has on the board.
Every active tropical cyclone in the National Hurricane Center’s own active-storm file: its name, what the Center classifies it as, how strong it is, where it is, and which way it is going. The file is read off nhc.noaa.gov every five minutes and redrawn here — the board as a card apiece, the positions marked on a coastline this page draws itself, and the Center’s Tropical Weather Outlook printed word for word.
This desk holds no forecast of its own. It does not model, predict, interpolate or advise. Every figure below either came out of one of the Center’s files or is arithmetic on one — knots into miles per hour, a bearing into a compass point, a wind into a Saffir–Simpson category — and each card is one click from the Center’s own advisory, which is the authority on all of it.
This is not a warning service. It carries no watches, no warnings, no evacuation notices, no forecast track and no cone. If you are deciding whether to move, to board up or to leave, read hurricanes.gov and your local National Weather Service office, and do what they tell you. Nothing on this page should be used to make that decision.
three basins — Atlantic, East Pacific, Central Pacific · the Center’s own advisories · read every 5 minutes · drawn by this page’s own hand
The board
One card per system.
Each active system gets its classification spelled out in words, with the code the file carries printed beside it; the sustained wind in knots as the forecast advisory gives it and in miles per hour as the public advisory does; the minimum central pressure; the position; the movement as a compass point, a bearing and a speed; and the Saffir–Simpson category, which is arithmetic on the wind and is shown only for hurricanes, because the scale describes nothing else. Where the file gives no figure, the card says so rather than showing a zero.
The board
waiting for the file
Not read yet.
The map
Marks on a drawn coastline.
Every system on the board at once, placed by the file’s own coordinates, sized by the sustained wind and inked on the same strength scale as the cards, with the movement drawn as a short vector pointing the way the Center says the system is heading. The coastline is traced from Natural Earth’s public-domain 1:110m outline and carried in this page: no tiles, no library, no third-party map. Click a mark and the desk names the system under it.
The map
- under 34 kt
- 34–63 kt
- Cat 1 · 64–82
- Cat 2 · 83–95
- Cat 3 · 96–112
- Cat 4 · 113–136
- Cat 5 · 137 kt and up
The ink is the sustained wind. A system the Center does not call a hurricane is inked at the step its wind reaches but carries no category, because the Saffir–Simpson scale describes hurricanes.
Click a mark to name the system under it.
The outlook
The Center’s own words.
The Tropical Weather Outlook is the National Hurricane Center’s
statement about the next seven days: what it is watching, and what
chance it gives each disturbance of becoming a cyclone. Both basins
are printed here exactly as the Center transmits them — the WMO
header line at the top, the body, the $$ terminator and
the forecaster’s name at the bottom. Nothing is summarised,
shortened or rephrased, because a paraphrase of a formation chance is
a different claim from the one the Center made.
The outlook
About
A reading desk, not a warning service.
What this desk is not, first, because it matters more than what it is. It is not a forecast. It issues no watches and no warnings, draws no cone and no forecast track, names no county and tells nobody to leave. It cannot tell you whether a storm will reach you, when, or what to do about it. For anything you would act on, the National Hurricane Center publishes at hurricanes.gov and your local National Weather Service office issues the watches, warnings and evacuation guidance for where you are. Those are the sources; this page is a way of reading one of their files.
What it is: three of the Center’s public files, read every few minutes and laid out. The board comes from CurrentStorms.json, the active-storm file, which lists every system the Center currently has advisories out on. The outlook comes from the Atlantic and eastern Pacific Tropical Weather Outlook feeds. The Center serves all three without an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header, so a browser may not read them directly; a small relay on this site asks for them instead, caches each for five minutes and adds the header on the way out. It takes no URL from the caller — there are three routes and a caller may name one of them and nothing else.
Two figures are converted rather than copied. The sustained wind is knots in the file and is turned into miles per hour and kilometres per hour by the Center’s own rounding, to the nearest five, so that the figure here and the figure in the public advisory agree. The Saffir–Simpson category is derived from that wind against the Center’s published thresholds — 64, 83, 96, 113 and 137 knots — and is shown only where the Center classifies the system as a hurricane, because the scale describes hurricanes and a post-tropical or subtropical system has no category. The movement speed is left in the miles per hour the file gives it in. Everything else is reproduced as it arrived.
Times are shown twice over: how long ago, against your own clock, and the moment itself in your own zone, with the UTC the Center published in the title of every stamp. The map’s coastline is traced from Natural Earth’s public-domain 1:110m outline; it is scenery, not authority, and a mark on it is a position to one decimal place of a degree, which is roughly eleven kilometres. Your chosen basin is remembered in this browser and nowhere else. Most days of the year the active-storm file is empty, and on those days this page says so. What the files do not say, the desk does not invent.