About stormpast.com
stormpast.com is a reference for the tropical cyclone history of individual American places. For 1,019 counties, parishes and municipios across 19 hurricane-coast states, it lists every storm that has passed nearby since 1851: the date, the distance at closest approach, and the storm's status and wind speed at that moment.
What the site does
Each page is computed, not written by hand. NOAA's HURDAT2 database records the position of every known Atlantic and Northeast Pacific storm every six hours. Those tracks are interpolated to one-hour steps, and the great-circle distance from the county's geographic centre is measured at every step. A storm is counted when its closest approach falls within 50 miles. The same procedure runs for all 3,266 storms and all 1,019 places, so figures on one page are comparable with figures on another. The method and its limits are on the methodology page.
Why it exists
NOAA publishes the underlying database in full, as a fixed-width text file of six-hourly coordinates. Answering a question as ordinary as how often does a storm pass near my county, and when was the last one means parsing that file and doing the geometry yourself. Per-place hurricane pages elsewhere are usually compiled by hand, which limits how many places they cover, or were built once and never rebuilt as new seasons were added. The aim here is narrow: cover every county, apply one method to all of them, and rebuild when NOAA revises the data.
Who it is for
People who have moved somewhere and want to know its storm record. Residents checking how unusual a recent storm was. Writers, students and local historians who need dates and distances with the source named.
What the site does not do
- No forecasts. Nothing here predicts what a future storm will do. For anything forward-looking, see the National Hurricane Center at nhc.noaa.gov.
- No risk assessment. A count of past storms is not a probability, an insurance rating, or a statement about what a given address will experience.
- No safety guidance. Evacuation and preparedness instructions come from local emergency management and the National Weather Service.
- No damage or casualty records. HURDAT2 describes storm tracks and intensity, not what happened on the ground.
Independence and data
This is an independent project, run by one person. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by NOAA, the National Hurricane Center or the National Weather Service, and it is not an official source of weather information. Every figure is computed from public-domain federal data: NOAA's HURDAT2 databases and U.S. Census Bureau Gazetteer files. That federal material is not subject to copyright protection; the text, analysis and page design are original. Everything used is listed on the sources page.
Funding and contact
The site carries advertising through Google AdSense, which pays for the server. Advertisers have no say in what is published: the figures come out of the build process, and no page is written or withheld for anyone. Corrections and questions: contact@stormpast.com.
Who runs it
stormpast.com is built and maintained by Lokesh Rathore, an independent developer based in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. It is not a company and has no staff. The site runs on a server he rents and administers himself, and every page is generated by his own code from public NOAA data. Corrections and questions go to contact@stormpast.com — see Contact.