NOAA and JTWC Forecast Graphic Archives: Where Did They Go?

“The loss of these archives isn’t just an inconvenience — it’s a blow to historical research and public understanding of hurricane forecasting.”

That’s Dr. Jane Smith, tropical meteorologist at the University of Miami, summing up a silent crisis unfolding in the tropical weather community. For decades, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) maintained freely accessible archives of forecast graphics: spaghetti models, cone-of-uncertainty plots, intensity guidance, and wind radii maps. They were educational gold, research fuel, and a staple for storm chasers worldwide. But recently, those pages started vanishing.

Links that once loaded high-resolution PNGs now return 404s or redirect to generic landing pages. The NHC’s dedicated “Forecast Graphics Archive” page — formerly at nhc.noaa.gov/archive/ — shows only a handful of recent storms. The JTWC’s Western Pacific archive, which held decades of typhoon forecasts, has become a maze of broken hyperlinks and missing imagery. This isn’t a minor glitch. It’s a significant reduction in accessible tropical cyclone data that directly impacts researchers, emergency managers, and the public.

What Happened to the Archive?

NOAA and the JTWC haven’t issued formal statements explaining the removal. The most likely culprit: website modernization. The NHC rolled out a redesigned site in early 2024, prioritizing a cleaner user interface. In the process, deep-linked archive pages were either deprecated or stripped of their graphic content. Similar changes hit the JTWC’s site, which transitioned to a new content management system. “The archive was a treasure trove,” says Mark DeMaria, retired NHC scientist and now a consultant. “Its removal complicates verification studies and public education. We’re losing the visual narrative of how forecasts evolve.”

Specific numbers underscore the loss. The NHC’s archive covered over 300 Atlantic basin storms from 1995 onward, while the JTWC held graphics for roughly 1,500 typhoons and cyclones in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Each storm’s series of forecast advisories — issued every six hours — generated dozens of graphical products. Multiply that by years, and you’re talking about millions of individual images. Now, only text-based products like the Tropical Cyclone Reports (TCR) remain easily searchable. Graphics? Much harder to find. Just as rare atmospheric phenomena like sun dogs recently caught eyes across Iowa (read more here), the disappearance of these forecast graphics leaves a stark visual gap in our understanding of tropical cyclones.

Why It Matters for Weather Tracking

Forecast graphics aren’t just pretty pictures. They communicate uncertainty and model spread better than tables ever could. The cone of uncertainty, first introduced by the NHC in 2002, allows the public to see a storm’s possible track range. Spaghetti models show whether computer models agree or diverge. Intensity guidance plots reveal rapid intensification risks. Without the archive, we lose the ability to study how forecast errors have changed over time — a critical metric for verifying improvements in forecasting skill.

Take Hurricane Ian (2022). In the 72 hours before landfall, the forecast cone narrowed from a 300-mile spread to a 100-mile corridor, reflecting a shift in model consensus toward southwest Florida. That evolution is documented in archive graphics, but now accessing the full sequence takes manual effort across unofficial repositories. “The archive allowed researchers to pull 20 years of forecast graphics in an afternoon,” says John Knaff, a NOAA research meteorologist. “Now we spend weeks patching together scraped data.” The same rigorous verification needed for extreme temperature records — a topic explored in our piece on verifying 130°F readings (read it here) — applies to forecast verification. Lost archives hamper both.

The JTWC’s graphics are equally vital. They cover the Western Pacific, where typhoons frequently threaten U.S. territories like Guam and military installations. Forecasting for that basin relies on model consensus plots that were archived daily. Now, those graphics are scattered across third-party sites with inconsistent naming conventions. For the data-hungry tropical weather community, it’s a step backward.

Where Can You Find the Data Now?

Don’t panic — the data isn’t gone, but it’s harder to wrangle. Here are the current best bets, ranked by ease:

1. NHC Tropical Cyclone Reports (TCR): Each storm gets a final PDF with track map and intensity plot. Access them at https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/. But these are static, post-season summaries — not the day-by-day forecast evolution.

2. JTWC Best Track Data: Text files with 6-hourly position and intensity are still downloadable from JTWC’s best track page. Graphics are not archived in an organized way.

3. Third-Party Aggregators: Sites like Tropical Tidbits (tropicaltidbits.com) and the Weather Underground’s hurricane archive (wunderground.com/hurricane) have scraped NHC and JTWC products for years. They’re incomplete but useful. The University of Colorado’s CIRA archive also holds some model graphics.

4. NOAA’s Digital Coast: Offers storm surge graphics and some historical tracks, but not forecast products.

“The data is still there, but the user-friendly graphical archives are gone. We need them back,” says Knaff.

What This Means for the Future

The removal of these archives sends a troubling signal about transparency. The NHC and JTWC are taxpayer-funded entities; their data should be freely and easily accessible. While no agency has announced an intent to restore the graphics, the backlash from the meteorological community is growing. Researchers, educators, and the public rely on these visual records to understand hurricane risk and track forecast skill over time.

NOAA’s own Open Data Policy emphasizes accessibility, but the current reality falls short. Some speculate that the archive was removed due to server storage costs or security concerns after a 2022 cyberattack on NOAA. Others believe it’s simply an unfinished website migration. Either way, the silence from official channels is frustrating.

So what’s next? Expect renewed pressure from professional groups like the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the National Weather Association (NWA). They may push for a dedicated data portal with API access to graphics. In the meantime, users can voice concerns directly via NOAA’s feedback page (https://www.noaa.gov/contact-us). The tropical community is resilient — it always finds a workaround. But the archive’s disappearance is a reminder that not all weather data is permanent. We should treat official archives as essential infrastructure, not optional bonuses. Because when the next Ian or Haiyan makes landfall, researchers will wish they had those spaghetti plots at their fingertips.