Commercial use & enterprise access
StormDPS is built and published as an open scientific project — the methodology is documented, the dataset is on Zenodo under CC BY 4.0, the REST API is freely accessible. For organizations that need elevated access, dedicated SLAs, forecast-time scoring, or custom integration work, this page is the front door.
Why commercial users choose transparent methodology
The major catastrophe modeling vendors — RMS, AIR, KCC, JBA, Verisk — operate as priced black-boxes. Their licenses prohibit publishing the loss-modeling methodology in detail, which is acceptable for many use cases but creates friction in three:
- Regulatory pricing. State insurance regulators increasingly require carriers to justify rate filings against a transparent methodology. A model whose math you can't fully document is harder to defend.
- Independent review. Reinsurance brokers triangulating between vendor model outputs benefit from a published independent metric for cross-validation.
- Research and policy. Academic, NGO, and government users typically can't license closed cat models at all. StormDPS exists in the same regulatory and citation-friendly category as the IBTrACS dataset itself.
StormDPS is not a replacement for a full vendor cat model. It is a transparent, citable destructive-potential metric — useful as an independent benchmark, a research instrument, and a near-real-time situational-awareness input alongside whatever proprietary model you already pay for.
Access tiers
- Full Atlantic / EP / WP methodology
- ~200-storm historical dataset (CSV + JSON, CC BY 4.0)
- REST API, ~300 req/min shared rate limit
- Live tracker with active-storm DPS
- Stable URLs and dataset DOI for citation
- API key authentication, per-account rate limits (target: 100k req/hr)
- 99.9% uptime SLA with status page + email alerts
- Bulk historical endpoints (full bundle download, custom date ranges)
- Forecast-time DPS scoring of NHC / JTWC cones for active storms
- Custom-scenario endpoint: synthetic tracks, what-if landfall analysis
- Email support, no public ticket queue
- Score your reinsurance treaty book against the live historical set
- Custom sub-basin calibration for an underwritten region
- Quarterly validation reviews against the active season
- Custom data pipeline: ATCF / IBTrACS feeds integrated into your systems
- One-off scenario analysis (synthetic stress-test storms)
Who this is for
An independent open-methodology benchmark to cross-validate vendor cat model outputs. Useful for treaty pricing, retro programs, and ILS structuring conversations.
A published reference scale for tropical cyclone destructive potential, citable in technical documentation and regulatory filings.
Portfolio-level scoring against the historical record; situational awareness during active storms; regulator-defensible communication of risk to customers.
Pre-season exercise scenarios, plain-English risk communication that addresses the gap Saffir-Simpson leaves on size, surge, and duration.
An open, reproducible alternative to closed commercial models. Methodology and dataset DOI are citable in journal publications.
A consistent, defensible way to rank and compare tropical cyclones in editorial coverage — both real-time and historical retrospectives.
How licensing works
The historical dataset (stormdps.com/data) is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 via Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20149123. Commercial reuse — including incorporation into paid products — is permitted under that license, conditional only on attribution.
What the commercial tiers add is service capacity (rate limits, SLA, bulk endpoints, support) and integration work, not new rights to the underlying data. The dataset is and will remain open.
The CC BY 4.0 license, the published methodology, and the citation-ready Zenodo deposit make StormDPS suitable as a documented input in regulatory filings where closed cat models can be problematic. Pair it with vendor models rather than replacing them — that's the typical pattern.
Contact
What's available today vs in preview
Setting expectations honestly: the public API and historical dataset are live and fully usable right now. The commercial tier features described above (per-account rate limits, forecast-time scoring, custom-scenario endpoint, SLA) are in active design and prioritized by inbound demand. If your use case requires one of those today, say so in the email — concrete demand moves features up the queue.
Custom integration / consulting is available immediately on a project basis.