Script Release ::: hurdat2parser

hurdat2parser intakes, interprets, and outputs results based from the HURDAT2 file. HURDAT2 is a database of all tracked storm systems in the North Atlantic Ocean from 1851 to last year. Amongst kept data for each storm are winds at the center of circulation, mean sea-level pressure, and latitude and longitude coordinates of the center of the storm.

LINK: hurdat2parser

*** For complete documentation, see the readme at the link above.***

This script has a handful of in-house functions and the ability to output CSV files, which is very handy for those folks who are much more comfortable with spreadsheets.

In-house functions include searching for statistics for a single storm, names of the storm, seasonal ranges and tallies, and ranking. These are very beneficial to have for on-the-fly lookup.

CSV's can be generated based by storm, season. The sortable variables are ones not natively in HURDAT2. A very powerful advantage of spreadsheets is that it's already a GUI interface, so it's easier to use, and has graphing capabilities. You can do these things in Python, but for my needs/wants with this, a spreadsheet format is more than enough.

The other power of this script is it enables climatological tendency analysis; seeing how variables change over time. Output are 10-year and 30-year climatologies, incremented by 1-year at a time. The user can then generate a chart via spreadsheet to display the smoother, easier-to-interpret output enabled by climatological tendency analysis.