Combined satellite dataset of global tropical cyclones (NOAA TC PRIMED)
What it measures. A bundled record of tropical cyclones worldwide, centered on microwave satellite views of storm structure and rainfall, plus storm-track information and surrounding environmental conditions.
How it's made. NOAA assembles it from hurricane-center storm data, NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement satellites, and environmental fields from the ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis, delivered in NetCDF files.
How & where you'd use it. A research resource for understanding how hurricanes and typhoons form, intensify, and rain, and for improving forecasts of them.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span— → ongoing
What you can do with it
- Map air pollutants — NO₂, aerosols, ozone
- Track greenhouse gases and Earth's energy budget
- Feed weather and air-quality analysis
Official description
The Tropical Cyclone Precipitation, Infrared, Microwave and Environmental Dataset (TC PRIMED) is a dataset centered around passive microwave observations of global tropical cyclones from low-Earth-orbiting satellites. TC PRIMED is a compilation of tropical cyclone data from various sources, including 1) tropical cyclone information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Weather Service National Hurricane Center (NHC) and Central Pacific Hurricane Center (CPHC) and the U.S. Department of Defense Joint Typhoon Warning Center, 2) low-Earth-orbiting satellite observations and products from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission constellation satellites, and 3) environmental fields and diagnostics calculated from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) fifth-generation reanalysis (ERA5).
Get the data
# NOAA Open Data on AWS — public S3, no login
import s3fs
fs = s3fs.S3FileSystem(anon=True)
# find this dataset's bucket in the docs link in the sidebar, then:
# files = fs.ls("noaa-<bucket>/...")
# open NetCDF/GRIB with xarray, COGs with rioxarray NOAA Open Data is on public AWS S3 — no login at all (anonymous access).
Official links
- Open data source NOAA Open Data