About Storms That Hit

What this site publishes

For every US city with more than 2,000 people, the hurricanes and tropical storms whose track passed within 75 miles since 1851, the tornadoes that touched down within 25 miles since 1950 and the hail reported within 10 miles since 1955 — how close each came, how strong it was, and when.

Why it exists

The underlying data is public and free, but it is published for analysts rather than for readers: bulk files, codebooks, and lookup tools that expect you to know the identifier already. This site does the matching and the arithmetic, then states the answer in a sentence at the top of the page.

Where the figures come from

The National Hurricane Center's HURDAT2 best-track database and the Storm Prediction Center's tornado and hail databases, all published by NOAA. Distances are measured from the city centre to the track; the methodology page names the exact files and explains every count.

Nothing here is estimated, modelled or generated. Every number traces to a published federal record.

What it is not

Closeness to a track is not the same as damage: the worst winds sit within a few dozen miles of a hurricane's centre, and older tornado records under-count weak tornadoes in open country. Nothing here is a forecast or a risk rating.

Who publishes this site

Storms That Hit is published by ArtUp Labs, the trade name of Individual Entrepreneur Karpets A.V. (Artyom Karpets), Republic of Kazakhstan. It is a one-person operation: the same person writes the code that matches the federal records, checks the pages and answers the mail. There are no outside authors and no sponsored content. The site pays for itself with Google AdSense advertising.

The terms of use are on the terms page, and how the site handles data is in the privacy policy.

Corrections

If a page contradicts the official source, the official source is right and we want to know. Write to us from the contact page. How every count is made, and what has been corrected so far, is on the methodology page.