WND · Extreme value
Windstorm
GEV on ERA5 monthly fg10 maxima · v1.1.1 · 2026-07
North Sea & UK — extratropical storm belt, coast-to-inland gradient
The 100-year extreme wind gust, from 30 years of ERA5 climate reanalysis.
What ships
Surfaces + Returns — 0–1 score derived from the 100-year gust, plus per-return-period peak gust (rp10/25/50/100/200, m/s). Full-resolution (GSHHG-f) coastline: barrier islands now scored.
Every release: 0–1 score · 5-class band · per-pixel uncertainty · input-coverage mask · STAC item · methodology doc.
Inputs
ERA5 monthly gust extremes 1991–2020
Version history
What changed between releases — the same notes that ship with the data. Newest first.
Surfaces
v1.1.1
2026-07
current
- Full-resolution coastline (GSHHG-f). All four layers are re-clipped against the canonical GSHHG-f shoreline (~100 m native) — barrier islands and narrow coastal strips that previously read as NoData now carry a score (Wrightsville Beach, Oak Island, Caswell Beach and their class globally). Any query over real land returns a result.
- Rebuilt end-to-end. The tier-1 surfaces were recomputed from the ERA5 gust climatology through the hardened promote pipeline; inland values are unchanged (differences ≤ ~0.003 on the 0–1 scale).
- Product footprint is 70°S–90°N (the modeled gust domain); Antarctica is excluded by standard.
v1.1
2026-04
- Compact uint16 encoding. The surfaces were re-encoded from float32 to compact integer COGs with a documented scale (physical = raw × scale, nodata 65535) — smaller and self-describing, with no loss of precision at the delivered resolution. Method and values are unchanged from v1.0.
v1.0
2026-04
- Initial release. Susceptibility derived from a Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) fit to 30 years of ERA5 annual-maximum 10 m wind gusts (fg10, 1991–2020). The 100-year return-period gust is ranked to a 0–1 percentile scale, with a five-class map (Very Low → Very High, top 20% globally = storm-track crests, exposed high-latitude coasts), plus per-pixel uncertainty and coverage.
- Extratropical belt, correctly placed. The gust climatology captures the mid-latitude storm tracks — the North Sea / UK belt, the North American cyclone corridors — as the dominant exposure, with a coast-to-inland gradient.
Returns
v1.0
2026-07
current
- Initial release. Per-return-period extratropical peak 10 m wind gust from a per-cell generalized extreme value (GEV) fit to 30 years of ERA5 (1991–2020) annual-maximum gusts (fg10), at the 10-, 25-, 50-, 100-, and 200-year return periods. This is the synoptic / extratropical wind hazard — mid-latitude cyclones, nor'easters, derechos, downslope windstorms, and the Southern-Ocean storm belt; tropical cyclones are covered by the separate Petrel Hurricane Returns product.
- Physical units on one shared scale. Values are 10 m peak gust in m/s, with a single SCALE across all five return periods, so the layers are directly comparable and raw * src.scales[0] yields m/s.
- GSHHG-f canonical land mask (~100 m native): every real coast, including barrier islands, returns a value; ocean and Antarctica are NoData. Extratropical wind is a real hazard on all land, so there is no inland "zero" region.
- Same fit as Windstorm Surfaces. The 100-year gust here is exactly the field the Windstorm Surfaces line normalizes into its 0–1 susceptibility score.
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