User talk:Supportstorm

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Welcome to Wikimedia Commons, Supportstorm!

Updates needed for U.S. tornado tracks

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I hate to bother you, but some updates were made on tornadoes occurred from 2017 onward and your maps of all the U.S. tornado tracks from those years needs to be updated. Can you please do so? ChessEric (talk) 18:24, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That's the plan, to update past years maps, but since it's been so active lately I can only focus on 2024 tornadoes. Also doesn't help that most of my free time lately has actually been performing some of the surveys... Supportstorm (talk) 20:25, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

GIS tornado track data source

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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)[reply]

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)[reply]