Storms

Get Hurricane Hunter aircraft reconnaissance as GeoJSON.

Returns a GeoJSON FeatureCollection of NOAA/USAF Hurricane Hunter aircraft observations: vortex data message (VDM) center fixes and high-density (HDOB) flight-level observations. These are aircraft observations, not surface stations — METAR station reports are GET /v1/observations. NHC cones, tracks, and outlook areas stay on the sibling GET /v1/tropical overlay and are never merged into this payload.

Foreign member storms[] is the newest VDM fix per storm (or unnumbered USAF mission), queried independently of kind and limit. Unnumbered USAF missions carry atcf: null / storm_name: null, so storm= never matches them; kind=hdob without storm is how to see them.

Retention is 72 hours (hours max). The schema is x-stability: experimental: dropsonde/RECCO (kind values and properties) will land later and experimental excludes this resource from the 90-day breaking-change commitment.

Filters

  • kind — vdm (vortex fixes), hdob (flight-level obs), or all (both). Default all.
  • storm — ATCF id (al14) or name (polo). 1–32 letters, digits, spaces, or hyphens.
  • hours — lookback window, integer 1–72. Default 24.
  • limit — maximum features, integer 1–2000. Default 500.
  • min_lon, min_lat, max_lon, max_lat — optional bbox. All four must be supplied together as numbers. The box must satisfy -180 <= min_lon <= max_lon <= 180 and -90 <= min_lat <= max_lat <= 90 (NaN rejected); antimeridian-crossing boxes are not supported. Empty-valued bbox params count as absent.

Caching

Successful responses carry Cache-Control: public, max-age=30, stale-while-revalidate=30.

Auth

Standard sw-api Bearer auth applies.

get/v1/tropical/observations

Request

  • Base URL: https://api.smarterweather.com
  • URL: https://api.smarterweather.com/v1/tropical/observations
  • Auth: HTTP bearer

Query parameters

kind'vdm' | 'hdob' | 'all'

vdm = vortex fixes; hdob = flight-level obs; all = both. Default all.

stormstring

ATCF id (al14) or storm name (polo). Unnumbered USAF missions carry atcf/storm_name null, so storm= never matches them.

hoursinteger

Lookback window in hours (1-72). Default 24. Retention is 72 hours.

limitinteger

Maximum features to return (1-2000). Default 500.

min_lonnumber

Western bbox edge. Required together with min_lat, max_lon, and max_lat. The box must satisfy -180 <= min_lon <= max_lon <= 180 (NaN rejected).

min_latnumber

Southern bbox edge. Required together with the other three bbox params. The box must satisfy -90 <= min_lat <= max_lat <= 90 (NaN rejected).

max_lonnumber

Eastern bbox edge.

max_latnumber

Northern bbox edge.

Response

GeoJSON FeatureCollection of recon features. Empty features and storms arrays when no aircraft has flown in the window (200, not 404).

Changes

No recorded changes to this operation across all 1 revision of this API.