HURDAT

The Eastern Pacific database was compiled at the NHC in 1976 to help create two tropical cyclone forecast models. Initially, tracks for the Central Pacific region and tracks for tropical depressions that did not develop into tropical storms or hurricanes were not included. Over the next few years, tracks from the Eastern Pacific Hurricane Center (EPHC) were archived by the NHC annually. In 1982, the NHC started to include data on Central Pacific tropical storms and hurricanes, and began issuing advisories in 1988. In 2013, the format of the Eastern Pacific database was changed to include non-synoptic best track times and non-developing tropical depressions.

The Atlantic hurricane database

During 1959, a technical paper was published by the United States Weather Bureau, which consolidated several sources of records in to a single publication. These sources included annual summaries that had been published in the Monthly Weather Review at various times since 1922, unpublished materials from the Hurricane forecast offices and other studies on hurricanes and hurricane climatology back to around 1886. While combining the sources, position errors of over 100 miles (160 km) were found for several hurricanes shown in more than one source. Therefore, the positions of all of the systems that were considered to have tropical characteristics, were compared with the historical weather maps of the daily synoptic series. The most reliable positions and intensities were then plotted on a series of annual track charts, before being reviewed by the hurricane forecast centers, Extended Forecast Section and the National Hurricane Research Project. The most accurate and consistent locations from the reviews were then plotted on the maps and published. This dataset was subsequently updated during 1965, which extended the dataset back to 1871 and forwards to 1963 based on additional material.

At around this time, NASA's Apollo program requested data on the climatological impacts of tropical cyclones on launches of space vehicles at the Kennedy Space Center. The basic data was taken by the authors from the National Weather Records North Atlantic Tropical Cyclone deck number 988, which was updated and corrected to include data from 1886 to 1968. As a result of this work, a requirement for a computerized tropical cyclone database at the National Hurricane Center was realized, which led to the prediction of tropical cyclone motion out through 72 hours. Over the next few years, HURDAT was extensively revised, by both the NHC and the National Climatic Center, before it was published at irregular intervals. Over the next couple of decades, it became obvious that the database needed to be revised because it was incomplete, contained significant errors, or did not reflect the latest scientific understanding regarding the interpretation of past data. Charles J Neumann subsequently documented several of these problems and obtained a grant, to start addressing them in a programme that was eventually called the Atlantic Hurricane Database Re-analysis Project.

During the 1990s, Jose Fernandez-Partagas led efforts to document previously undocumented tropical cyclones from the mid 1800s until the early 1900s, by using lists of previous hurricanes, books and newspapers. After his death in 1997, the results of his efforts were built upon by the Atlantic reanalysis team, before being checked by NHC's Best Track Committee and added in to the Atlantic HURDAT in 2001 and 2003.

In 2013, the archive's format was significantly changed to include non-synoptic best track times, non-developing tropical depressions and wind radii.