Show HN: Tornadic — a community driven tornado DB
tornadic.net
I've been generally tornado curious since I was kid, starting off with the movie Twister (of course). I grew up in FL and went through a bunch of major hurricanes, so I've always loved meteorology.
Anyway, over the past year I've been getting deep into tornadoes. I haven't been able to find anything that's like a single source for tornadoes. Things like pictures, videos, radars, accounts, news articles, etc. Just one place to really pull all the info together for each tornado.
So, I've started to build that: [https://tornadic.net](https://tornadic.net)
*Quick summary of features:*
* Comprehensive database with about 80,000 tornadoes from the NCEI storm events DB.
* Daily SPC tornado reports
* Ability to add and vote on community contributions like pictures, videos, and news.
* Radar loop generator using NEXRAD data for tornadoes and SPC reports.
* Community-driven corrections and edits to tornado data.
* Planned open-access data downloads.
The data is started from the NCEI storm events DB for all tornadoes -- about 80,000 of them.
For example, here's the Joplin EF-5: https://tornadic.net/tornadoes/f693a33d-952a-415b-938c-a3204...
Or the Lubbock F5: https://tornadic.net/tornadoes/17edaebf-e75d-4164-9835-b1bb1...
You can add pictures, videos, etc to tornadoes. Community members can vote up or down submissions. This also works for suggesting edits to the NCEI data, since that's not always super accurate either.
I built a service which allows you to generate radar loops for tornadoes, if they happened to occur when there is a NEXRAD station near by. This grabs the raw radar files, generates an overlay, and then overlays it onto an animation. It's not perfect but it works surprisingly well. (This is currently hosted on a 8gb pi, so it's slow, but works!)
I also added pulling in SPC reports and allow radar loop creation for those, too. You can also add all the same contributions to the SPC reports, and they carry over when they eventually become a 'tornado' in the DB.
My hope is to build something that tornado enthusiasts use to build a solid and accurate DB of all the tornadoes (US only, at the moment). There's still a lot of work to do, like adding the ability to relate damage assessments to tornadoes, using their API. But I think it's enough now to try and see if folks like this or not
Lastly, I plan on making the data open so anyone can download the DB themselves. The goal is really to make a great source of tornado information.
Anyway, I'm open to suggestions, feedback, etc! It's okay to tell me it's dumb
Oh, one last thing, I forgot to mention radar generation is only really behind auth right now because it's running on a pi. Once I get this onto a big boy server (takes bit of resources to parse the radar files with py-ART), I'll let everyone click the button.