NHC/TPC RSS Feeds

Tropical Cyclone Advisories released by the NHC/TPC are now available through RSS. This page is a brief summary of RSS, what it does and how you can use it.

What is RSS?

RSS has several meanings: Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, and RDF Site Summary where RDF in turn stands for Resource Data Framework. In any case it is a method of summarizing the latest news and information from a website in a lightweight form that can be easily read by any of a number of news readers or news aggregators. The idea is to give users the ability to quickly obtain the latest news and updates from a site in a headline or news digest format. This in turn helps during high-traffic periods by reducing the load on the servers.

What do I need to use the RSS feeds?

To use our RSS feeds, you need a feed reader or news aggregator installed on your computer. These are applications that can be set to read the feeds on a recurring basis, generally once an hour or so.

Here is a list of feed readers and news aggregators from the Open Directory Project.

Here is another list of feed readers and news aggregators.

Once you have installed a feed reader or news aggregator, you simply add the NHC/TPC feed addresses to the list of feeds in the reader. The installation instructions for the readers will help you with that. If your newsreader or aggregator uses "auto-discovery" then simply enter the main NHC/TPC address (http://www.nhc.noaa.gov) and it will find the two feeds.

What are the feed addresses?

We currently offer three feeds, one in English and one in Spanish for Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico tropical cyclones, and one in English for Eastern Pacific tropical cyclones.

Note that at the present time our Spanish-language text products are limited to the Tropical Weather Outlook and the Public Advisories for Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico tropical cyclones. All of our Spanish text products are courtesy of the NWS San Juan Weather Forecast Office, Puerto Rico.

Here are the addresses:

Atlantic (English): http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/index-at.xml

Atlantic (Spanish): http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/index-at-sp.xml

Eastern Pacific (English): http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/index-ep.xml

You can click on the links to view the RSS feeds in your browser, but you will need a feed reader or news aggregator to process the information. Here is an example of the Atlantic feed..

Technical Q&A

What version of RSS do you use?

At the present time our feeds use the RSS 2.0 specification. The feeds give the date, time, and advisory number in a fixed format for the latest advisories, along with the link to the advisory itself. We don't include the actual advisory text in the feeds at this time, although we do include the text for the latest Tropical Weather Outlook for the corresponding basin.

Why is the XML logo on the page?

The XML logo and the RSS logo are both currently in use across the Internet to indicate to users the availability of RSS feeds from the site. XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language, and is the basic lingo of the RSS technology. We simply decided to display both logos.

Got More Questions?

If you have problems, questions, or feedback regarding the RSS feeds, please send them to our webmaster.