Code and notes for collecting surveyed tornado path geometries as reference data for ongoing work on reconstructing tornado trajectories and impact corridors from natural language reports.
This repository currently uses the NOAA Damage Assessment Toolkit FeatureServer.
Damage Assessment Toolkit GUI
https://apps.dat.noaa.gov/stormdamage/damageviewer/
Post-Storm Data Acquisition document
https://www.weather.gov/media/directives/010_pdfs/pd01016004curr.pdf
extract_noaa_polygons.py
Script for downloading tornado path geometries from the NOAA DAT FeatureServerREADME.md
Short project description and links
The script can
- query the NOAA DAT FeatureServer
- download path lines, polygons, or both
- filter by date range
- optionally require a non-empty field such as comments
- export results as JSON
The current configuration includes geometry_type, start_date, end_date, non_empty_field, and output_dir in the config block at the top of the script :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}. The script writes JSON exports containing layer metadata and the downloaded features :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}.
pip install requests tqdm