Documenting Storm Reports
For very recent storm reports, use the NWS Archives on the CIG server:
- Use the National Weather Service Archives
- For the selected dates, keep in mind that NWS products are based on UTC - meaning if events may have spanned 6 pm CST (7 pm CDT) you will need to search on the following date as well.
- Select "Local Storm Reports" as the product
- Select NWS Office(s) based on requested county - KOUN (western Oklahoma), KTSA (eastern Oklahoma), KAMA (Panhandle), or KSHV (McCurtain County)
- When the screen is done listing reports, copy the text (ctrl-A to select all text and right-click the mouse and choose "copy"); open up notepad or wordpad and paste the text into a file.
- Edit the file to remove reports not within the region (i.e., search for the selected county and delete any reports in-between).
- Save the edited file and print or e-mail it to the person requesting the information.
- CAUTION: There could be sporadic NOAAport outages that would cause OCS to miss some reports in its archive.
Local Storm Reports are also combined on the Storm Prediction Center website
- Enter the date using a six-digit number (yymmdd) in the section, "Storm report data for past days"
- The map shows tornado, wind, and hail reports and total numbers of each.
- Hail reports are categorized below tornado reports; search for the selected county / state.
- You can select the "in CSV format" and copy-and-paste the file to Excel to sort by state and county - paste the text into Excel and use the "Text to Columns" option in the "Data" menu, selecting Delimited - comma.
- CAUTION: Sometimes reports are not listed on the SPC site but are listed on other sites; you may want to cross-check before providing the data.
After about 5-6 months, storm reports are added to the NCDC Storm Events database.
- You can select a county or leave it as *All for the whole state.
- The database is best for Hail or Tornado events, although other events can be selected; just use them with caution.
- You can refine your search criteria through the "Limit Search Results" menu, such as specifying an F-scale for tornadoes or a size of hail. The default will be any events meeting minimum severe criteria.
- Events are separated by county. Therefore, if a storm crossed county lines, it will be listed as two separate events (usually only a problem for tornadoes). Be wary using this for counts of storm events in the state for a selected time frame.
- Highlighted "Location or County" link will provide additional details for a particular event. For more recent events, there may be an extended narrative Description (mostly from tornadoes damage surveys).
Publications:
- The official record is kept in Storm Data, available from NCDC. OCS maintains an in-house archive of the publication, but if directing someone to a website, give them the NCDC site. Caution: the NCDC site may include fees.
- Preliminary Storm Reports are available on the NWS Forecast Offices websites, Norman - western Oklahoma; Tulsa - Eastern Oklahoma; and Amarillo - Panhandle.