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Tornado Dashboard & DAT Integration

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full-bars edited this page May 3, 2026 · 1 revision

Tornado Dashboard & DAT Integration 📂

SPCBot includes a sophisticated suite for tracking confirmed tornadoes and damage surveys, bridging the gap between real-time alerts and post-storm analysis.

📋 The Dashboard (/recenttornadoes & /sigtor)

The /recenttornadoes command provides a centralized view of all confirmed tornadoes logged by the bot.

  • Summary View: A high-level breakdown of EF ratings (🟣EF5 to ⚪EFU) for the last 30 days.
  • Card View: Detailed interactive cards for each event, including location, rating, and office.
  • Significant Events (/sigtor): A filtered view specifically for EF2+ or PDS (Particularly Dangerous Situation) tornadoes.

🏁 Lead Time Tracking

For every confirmed tornado, the bot attempts to calculate the Lead Time—the duration between the initial Tornado Warning issuance and the first report of the tornado on the ground.

  • This metric is automatically added to the dashboard cards once a matching LSR (Local Storm Report) is received.

🛰️ NWS Damage Assessment Toolkit (DAT)

The bot is deeply integrated with the NWS DAT for high-resolution post-storm data:

  • Automated Survey Detection: The bot monitors PNS (Public Information Statements) for "Damage Survey" keywords.
  • Local Track Rendering: Using official DAT geometry, the bot renders high-detail tornado track maps on OpenStreetMap (OSM) tiles locally, providing a cleaner alternative to standard static maps.
  • Interactive Photo Carousels: If official damage photos are available in the DAT, the bot provides a paginated carousel (via the 📸 Photos button) to view them directly in Discord.

🧬 Matching Logic

The bot uses a geographic and temporal matching engine to link real-time warnings to post-storm surveys:

  1. LSR Linkage: Links "Confirmed Tornado" reports to the warning that covered them.
  2. Survey Linkage: Uses a haversine distance search (50km radius) to link DAT tracks to the original "Significant Events" logged in the bot's events.db.

💾 The events.db Archive

All significant events are stored in a dedicated SQLite archive (cache/events.db) with a rolling 365-day retention. This database is separate from the operational state to ensure it can grow to thousands of records without impacting bot performance.

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