Hurricane and Coastal Surge Tracker: Visualizing the Storms That Shape The Coast of USA

Few natural forces have as much impact on the North Carolina coast as hurricanes. Every season, powerful systems sweep across the Atlantic, reshaping shorelines, testing infrastructure, and reminding us of the delicate balance between land and sea. The Hurricane and Coastal Surge Tracker is an interactive map designed to bring this story to life, merging historical hurricane tracks, active storm forecasts, and coastal tide data into one unified, real-time visualization.

Tracking a Century of Storms

The web map layers more than a century of historical hurricane tracks from NOAA’s International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS). Each gray line traces the path of a past storm, a chaotic web of movement that, taken together, reveals recurring corridors of intensity. These tracks form a visual history of the Atlantic’s fury: where storms form, how they bend, and where they tend to make landfall.

Zooming in on the map, the tangled storm paths resolve into individual narratives, each one representing days of wind, rain, and uncertainty. Collectively, they provide a sobering record of just how frequently the Carolinas have found themselves in a hurricane’s path.

Real-Time Tide and Surge Monitoring

Along the coast, NOAA tide gauge stations are marked by blue icons. These stations continuously record sea level, wave height, and surge conditions, forming the backbone of the nation’s coastal monitoring network. During a storm, these small markers become essential indicators of how much water is actually rising along the shore, data that can mean the difference between a warning and a catastrophe.

The integration of storm surge risk layers from NOAA’s Storm Surge Hazard Maps and SLOSH basins (Sea, Lake, and Overland Surges from Hurricanes) gives coastal planners a way to visualize where water could inundate land. Overlaying active forecast cones and surge probabilities provides a snapshot of both the past and the potential future.

A Data-Driven Coastal Storyboard

Behind the visualization lies a modern open-source stack, geopandas and shapely for spatial analysis, folium for interactive mapping, and contextily for lightweight basemaps. The project even supports animation, stitching multiple frames together into GIFs that show storms evolving over time from tropical depressions to hurricanes, and finally their dissipation or landfall.

But at its core, this isn’t just about code or data. It’s about perspective and seeing the collective fingerprint of hundreds of storms, and the places that have learned to live with them.

Why It Matters

North Carolina’s coastal zone is home to vibrant communities, fragile ecosystems, and vital infrastructure. By integrating historical data with real-time monitoring, tools such as this tracker empower local decision-makers, researchers, and the public to better understand coastal risk.

Each line, point, and layer tells part of a bigger story, one of resilience, adaptation, and respect for the dynamic forces that shape our shores.