NOAA Storm Events Database Scraper — Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Hail, Floods

Extract historical storm event records from NOAA's authoritative Storm Events Database covering tornadoes, hurricanes, hail, floods, blizzards, wildfires, droughts, and other severe weather events from 1950 to the present. Filter by year, event type, US state, and minimum property damage. Records include geographic coordinates, casualties, damage estimates, meteorological details, and narrative descriptions.

This is the canonical US severe weather dataset maintained by NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). Originally compiled by the National Weather Service, the Storm Events Database contains over 1.8 million observations of significant weather and is the dataset of record for the insurance, reinsurance, climate-risk, and emergency-management industries.

Features

• Full year coverage: Any year from 1950 to present, fetched directly from NCEI's pub-data CSV archive
• Streaming gzip decompression: Handles multi-hundred-MB years (e.g., 2011's Joplin/tornado-super-outbreak year) without OOM
• Damage parsing: Converts NOAA's encoded values like 5.00K, 12.50M, 1.50B into raw USD numbers (damagePropertyUSD)
• Event-type filter: Case-insensitive partial match against EVENT_TYPE — e.g. "Tornado", "Hail", "Tropical Storm", "Excessive Heat"
• State filter: Exact match against STATE
• Damage threshold: Skip events below a configurable property-damage minimum
• Geographic precision: BEGIN_LAT/LON and END_LAT/LON parsed into floats for GIS pipelines
• Casualty data: Direct and indirect injuries / deaths per event
• Narratives: Full event and episode narrative text included — perfect for RAG pipelines and LLM-driven claim assessment

Output Fields

Field	Description
eventId	NOAA event identifier
beginDateTime / endDateTime	Event start and end timestamps
state / stateFips	US state name and FIPS code
year / month	Year and month name
eventType	Tornado, Hail, Flash Flood, Hurricane, etc.
czType / czName	County/zone type and name
beginLat / beginLon / endLat / endLon	Geographic coordinates
injuriesDirect / injuriesIndirect	Casualty counts
deathsDirect / deathsIndirect	Fatality counts
damageProperty / damagePropertyUSD	Raw string + parsed USD
damageCrops / damageCropsUSD	Crop damage raw + parsed
magnitude / magnitudeType	Wind speed / hail size / etc.
tornadoFScale	EF-scale rating (EF0–EF5)
source	Reporting source (NWS, public, etc.)
eventNarrative / episodeNarrative	Full text narratives

How to Scrape NOAA Storm Events

1. Open the actor and click Try for free
2. Set year to the year you want (e.g., 2024)
3. Optional: filter by eventTypeFilter (e.g., Tornado), stateFilter (e.g., TEXAS), or minDamageProperty (e.g., 1000000)
4. Click Start — the actor will stream the year's gzipped CSV directly from NCEI, parse it, apply your filters, and push results to the dataset

Pricing

This actor charges $0.003 per result. A typical year contains 60,000–80,000 events; with filters you typically pay for a few hundred to a few thousand. Apify compute costs are separate (the actor uses streaming so memory stays at 512MB regardless of year size).

Input Example

{
  "year": 2024,
  "eventTypeFilter": "Tornado",
  "stateFilter": "TEXAS",
  "minDamageProperty": 100000,
  "maxResults": 5000
}

Output Example

{
  "eventId": "1234567",
  "beginDateTime": "06-MAY-24 14:23:00",
  "state": "TEXAS",
  "eventType": "Tornado",
  "czName": "JOHNSON",
  "beginLat": 32.4156,
  "beginLon": -97.2873,
  "tornadoFScale": "EF2",
  "damagePropertyUSD": 2500000,
  "injuriesDirect": 3,
  "deathsDirect": 0,
  "eventNarrative": "A tornado touched down southwest of Cleburne..."
}

Other Actors You May Like

• NOAA Weather Alerts — live NWS alerts
• FEMA Disasters Scraper — federal disaster declarations
• NOAA NCEI Climate Scraper — climate normals and observations

FAQ

Q: How current is the data? A: NCEI updates the database monthly. The most recent month may not yet be available.

Q: Why do some events have $0 damage? A: NOAA records many events for which damage was not reported or assessed.

Q: Can I filter by multiple event types? A: Currently the filter is a single partial match; run the actor multiple times for distinct types.

Legal Disclaimer

Data is sourced from NOAA NCEI's public Storm Events Database, a US government work in the public domain. This actor extracts only publicly accessible, non-personal data and is intended for research, journalism, climate risk modeling, and insurance/actuarial use. Users are responsible for compliance with their local laws and any downstream-use obligations.