About StormDPS
StormDPS is an independent open-data project that scores tropical cyclone destructive potential on a modern 0–100 scale — capturing storm size, surge, duration, and geographic reach, not just peak wind. Built and maintained by one person, all source data is public, all methodology is published.
Why this exists
The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale was developed in 1971. It rates a hurricane on a single variable — peak one-minute sustained wind — and it has not been updated since. In 2026, with satellite altimetry, scatterometer winds, ocean heat content, and Integrated Kinetic Energy all measured continuously in real time, that's a strange place for the public conversation about hurricanes to still be anchored.
The cost of that anchor is real. Hurricane Ike (2008) made landfall as a Saffir-Simpson Category 2 and caused more inflation-adjusted damage than several Category 4 and 5 storms in the same era. Hurricane Patricia (2015) reached 185 knots of peak wind — the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere — and caused comparatively little damage because it weakened before landfall. The public scale rates Patricia higher. The damage record rates Ike higher. The scale is wrong about which storm to worry about, and it's been wrong since the satellite era began.
StormDPS exists because the math to do better has been available in the meteorological literature for decades — Powell & Reinhold introduced Integrated Kinetic Energy in 2007 specifically to address Saffir-Simpson's blind spots — and the public-facing tools to apply it consistently haven't existed. This is an attempt to build that, openly, with every input and coefficient documented.
About the author
For interview requests, partnerships, data licensing, academic collaboration, or technical questions, see the contact section below.
What StormDPS is
- Live tracker — interactive analysis of every named tropical cyclone, active or historical, in any basin. Wind field, track, score components, side-by-side comparisons.
- Open methodology — the full computational approach is published, including basin-specific calibration coefficients and the IKE integration scheme.
- Open dataset — ~200 storms with peak intensity, wind-field radii, duration, damage estimates, and computed DPS scores. CSV and JSON, CC BY 4.0 license, free to download and redistribute including commercially.
- Ranked historic storms — a curated list of the most destructive tropical cyclones in modern history, ranked by DPS rather than peak wind. The order differs from Saffir-Simpson's.
- Public REST API — every score is fetchable as JSON for researchers, journalists, and downstream applications. No key, no rate-limit gate, fair use.
What StormDPS is not
The National Hurricane Center, Joint Typhoon Warning Center, and your local meteorological service produce official watches, warnings, and evacuation recommendations. StormDPS does not. DPS is a destructive-potential score computed from observed or forecast track data — it is meant for situational awareness, historical comparison, and research. Evacuation decisions should be made on the basis of official NHC/JTWC products and local emergency management direction.
Independence and funding
StormDPS is self-funded and runs on a small Railway-hosted server with Cloudflare in front. There are no advertisers, no sponsored content, no paywalled features, and no commercial relationships that would influence which storms are surfaced or how they're scored. The full source code is on GitHub under an open license.
If you'd like to support the project, the most useful thing you can do is cite the methodology or dataset in your own work — academic, journalistic, or otherwise — and let me know so I can track impact. The dataset has a permanent Zenodo DOI for academic citation: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20149123.
Contact
Interview requests, expert commentary during active storms, fact-checking, op-eds, podcast invitations.
Data licensing for commercial use, API integration partnerships, white-label arrangements, research collaboration.
Bug reports, methodology corrections, feature requests, and dataset errata. Pull requests welcome.
BibTeX, APA, and Zenodo DOI for citing the dataset or methodology in academic work.
Acknowledgements
StormDPS would not be possible without the work of the meteorologists, researchers, and engineers behind the public data sources it relies on: the U.S. National Hurricane Center, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, NOAA's IBTrACS archive, the ATCF system at UCAR/RAL, and decades of foundational research from Powell & Reinhold (Integrated Kinetic Energy), the SLOSH surge-modeling team at NOAA, and the broader tropical-meteorology community.