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NGS emergency response imagery

Available since v0.34 as noaa:emergency-response-imagery. After a hurricane, flood, fire, or tornado, NOAA's National Geodetic Survey (NGS) flies the damaged area, mosaics the photographs, and cuts the mosaic into GeoTIFF tiles, which it shows at storms.ngs.noaa.gov and publishes in the anonymous noaa-eri-pds S3 bucket through NOAA Open Data Dissemination. The bucket also holds yearly pre-event surveys of the coasts. No AWS credentials or SDK are needed.

Events

The bucket's top level is one folder per event, 52 when listed on 2026-09-29, from 2005_Hurricane_Katrina to 2026_Pre_Event. Name one exactly with event; a misspelling is answered with the nearest names and the full list.

Only three events are tornadoes: 2011_Joplin_Tornado (61 tiles, 2.1 GB), 2015_Illinois_Tornadoes (171 tiles, 9.2 GB), and 2020_Nashville_Tornado (163 tiles, 7.1 GB). NGS's site also lists a 2011 Tuscaloosa tornado response that is not in the bucket. The rest are 36 hurricanes and tropical storms, five floods (2015_Midwest_Flood, 2016_Louisiana_Flooding, 2025_Texas_Flood, and the Midwest floods of 2025 and 2026), 2023_California and 2025_California_Fires, the 2009 Nor'easter, and five pre-event surveys, 2022 to 2026. Events run from 2.1 GB (Joplin) to 2.7 TB of GeoTIFFs (Helene).

Selection

  • event (required): the event folder.
  • collection: one or more folders under the event, comma-separated, such as a flight, 20200307a_RGB, or a nested folder, 20221112a_RGB/ortho-cogs. Without it, every folder is selected. A folder that does not exist is answered with the event's folders.
  • max_gb (default 25): a selection whose listed sizes add up to more than this many gigabytes (10^9 bytes) is refused, with its file count, total, and largest folders, so a dry run of a whole hurricane says where its terabytes are. Raise it deliberately.
  • A bbox or place keeps the files whose footprint meets it (see below).
  • start/end, variables, and free text are refused.

Every .tif in a selected folder is one asset, fetched whole and unchanged. The raw/ folders beside recent flights (the individual camera JPEGs and their .geom files) and each event's downloads/ folder (tar archives per flight, up to 126 GB) are not part of the dataset, and neither are the VRT, shapefile, MRF, and FlatGeobuf indexes. Asset ids are the whole bucket key, since two folders can hold files of the same name. Listing walks one folder at a time, so the thousands of raw frames are never listed.

Folders and file names

Naming Where What the name states
20200307aC0852700w360900n.tif 2005 to 2026, most folders North-west corner: 85°27'00"W 36°09'00"N. Older folders drop the flight prefix or the C (0771630w353730n.tif, nov06b0740600w394930n.tif); pre-event tiles prefix the survey (EC2301a_OB_N_C0741545w393044n.tif).
may24C350000e4102500n.tif Joplin and Irene, 2011 North-west corner in UTM metres, zone from the folder: may24JPEGtiles_UTMZone15.
nov15C377500e4087500n.tif 2009 Nor'easter UTM metres with no zone anywhere.
29907494.tif, geo-C24700126.tif, S18367842.tif, 2016obP28168649.tif, 20200918bRR26261021.tif, 061922_1112221943103_057_RGB1.tif, mwflood-28-98.tif Wilma, Ernesto, Humberto, Gustav, Ike, Arthur, the Matthew and Louisiana obliques, Sally's NIR frames, Nicole's ortho-cogs, one Midwest-flood flight Nothing: individual frames or row and column numbers.
20240807a_RGB.tif Recent flights (Debby, Francine, Milton, Erin, the 2025 floods, 2024 pre-event) A reduced-resolution mosaic of the whole flight, beside its tiles.

Degree tiles are 90 arc-seconds on a side through 2020 and 45 arc-seconds from 2021, each with a 0.0001° buffer; UTM tiles are 2.5 km with a buffer of up to 50 m. Folder names begin with the flight's local date where they carry one (20200307a, aug30, with the event's year).

Footprints and bbox

With a bbox, each tile is placed by the corner its name states and the tile size of its folder, read from the GeoTIFF header of the folder's first tile in one 64 KiB range request. The box is widened by 2 arc-seconds (about 60 m) for degree names, since some names truncate a second (3044 for 30'45"), and by 100 m for UTM names, so a tile that touches the box is never missed and one within that distance of it may be kept. A flight mosaic is placed by its own header. Each asset's bbox is that footprint. See ADR 0052.

A bbox is refused, not ignored, when a selected folder holds any file whose name places nothing: the numbered, oblique, and single frames above, and the Nor'easter's zone-less UTM tiles. The error names those folders and the ones that can be placed; pass the latter with collection. Without a bbox these events list like any other. Positions are only as good as NGS states them: 3 to 5 m horizontally in flat terrain, not assessed.

Time

start and end are refused. Folder dates are local calendar dates (the raw frames of the Texas flood's 20250710a flight are stamped 00:00 to 01:59 UTC on 11 July), and the 2005 to 2008 frames, the 2009 finals, and the pre-event surveys carry no date. Choose flights by folder instead. An asset's time is its folder's local day as the UTC interval it covers in U.S. time zones, from 04:00 UTC that day to 10:00 UTC the next, or, for an undated folder, an interval open from 1 January of the event's year.

The files

GeoTIFFs of 8-bit red, green, and blue, with a fourth transparency band in the 2017 to 2019 tiles and from 2021, in NAD83 or WGS 84 degrees, or UTM metres for 2009 to 2011. Three tiles of every folder that can be placed, probed on 2026-09-29, were JPEG-compressed through 2020, LZW-compressed after events from 2021, and Deflate-compressed in the pre-event surveys. NODD describes the files as GeoTIFF, cloud-optimized for recent events, and every file probed carried internal overviews. Sizes range from 0.15 MB (a pre-event tile of mostly empty sea) to 1.7 GB (a 2025 California fires tile). The UTM tiles state no coordinate system at all, so their assets record properties: {utm_zone: "15"}, taken from the folder name.

No reader is bundled; the files are bytes. GDAL and rasterio read them fully. Pillow, which matplotlib installs, read the overviews of the JPEG and Deflate tiles tried by seeking to a later image, which is enough to look at one; see the walkthrough.

Examples

# The whole Nashville tornado flight: 163 tiles, 7.1 GB, listed only.
uv run usdata fetch noaa:emergency-response-imagery -p event=2020_Nashville_Tornado --dry-run

# The four tiles around the North Nashville and Germantown damage path.
uv run usdata fetch noaa:emergency-response-imagery -p event=2020_Nashville_Tornado \
  --bbox -86.80,36.165,-86.78,36.18

# Hurricane Matthew's oblique folders refuse a bbox, so name tiled flights:
# one tile from each, 17 MB, in eastern North Carolina.
uv run usdata fetch noaa:emergency-response-imagery -p event=2016_Hurricane_Matthew \
  -p collection=20161011_RGB_JpegTiles_GCS_NAD83,20161013_RGB_JpegTiles_GCS_NAD83 \
  --bbox -77.62,35.93,-77.61,35.94 --dry-run

See the service research notes for dated upstream probes.

Metadata sources

Every value in the catalog entry comes from one of these pages or from the bucket itself; a field NGS does not publish is left empty rather than estimated.

  • Description, update frequency, license, and terms: the NODD registry entry (its source, noaa-eri.yaml, gives "Manually when needed" and the NODD open-use statement) and the NOAA Open Data Dissemination page.
  • Spatial resolution: each event's page on storms.ngs.noaa.gov states an approximate ground sample distance: 35 cm (1.14 feet) for Katrina and Joplin, ~15 cm for Nashville, and 15 - 30 cm for Helene.
  • Temporal resolution, accuracy, and constraints: the per-event InPort records, such as Nashville's (one flight on 2020-03-07, 3 to 5 m horizontal accuracy "not assessed", "not intended for mapping, charting or navigation").
  • Citation: NGS publishes a citation per event in InPort, such as "National Geodetic Survey, 2026: 2020 NOAA NGS Emergency Response Imagery: Nashville, TN Tornado, https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/inport/item/59027"; none covers the whole bucket, so the entry uses the agency, product, and access form. Cite the event's record where one exists.
  • Spatial and temporal extent, variables, and file facts: the bucket listing of 2026-09-29 and the GeoTIFF headers probed that day (see the research notes). The extent covers every tile corner, 124.8°W to 64.5°W and 17.6°N to 48.5°N; the start is Katrina's first flight folder, aug30, of 2005.
  • Latency is empty: NGS states none.

All NOAA datasets.

Reference

noaa:emergency-response-imagery · Released · Included since usdata 0.34. NGS Emergency Response Imagery.

At a glance

  • Files: GeoTIFF
  • Selection: Whole GeoTIFFs of one event folder, optionally by subfolder and by the footprint that tile names give
  • Required inputs: An event folder; optionally collection folders and a bbox
  • Open locally: Local files; no bundled reader for this format
  • On usdata.dev: Post-event aerial imagery tiles, with a walkthrough

Parameters

Pass these as --param name=value to the CLI, as params: entries in a manifest, or as keyword arguments to build_query.

Parameter Meaning
collection Folder(s) under the event, such as the flight 20200307a_RGB: one, a list, or comma-separated; default every folder.
event Required event folder, exactly as the bucket names it, such as 2020_Nashville_Tornado.
max_gb Refuse a selection larger than this many gigabytes (10^9 bytes); default 25.

Variables

Variable Units Meaning
Red — Red band, 8-bit
Green — Green band, 8-bit
Blue — Blue band, 8-bit
Alpha — Transparency band marking imaged pixels, in the collections that carry one

Catalog facts

  • Availability: since 0.34
  • Domain: Natural hazards
  • Spatial resolution: Approximate ground sample distance stated per event, such as 35 cm (1.14 feet) for Katrina and Joplin, ~15 cm for Nashville, and 15 - 30 cm for Helene
  • Temporal resolution: One or more flights per event, one folder per flight
  • Updates: Manually when needed
  • Terms of use: https://www.noaa.gov/information-technology/open-data-dissemination
  • Citation: National Geodetic Survey, NOAA Emergency Response Imagery, accessed via usdata from https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-eri
  • Geographic bounds (WGS84): west -124.8°, south 17.6°, east -64.5°, north 48.5°
  • Catalog date range: 2005-08-30 to open-ended
  • Coverage varies by station, product, and date; the range above does not guarantee observations.
  • Upstream documentation
  • License: US Government Work (public domain)
  • Transport: s3
  • Adapter: usdata.providers.noaa.eri:EmergencyResponseImagery