DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.13730302
title: 2nd Data Release of Project Severe Weather Archive of the Philippines (SWAP DR2)

description: Project Severe Weather Archive of the Philippines (SWAP) issues its 2nd Data Release, labelled as SWAP DR2. The temporal extent of the data is now from 1968 to Present. SWAP DR2 currently features the following; 





Geographic decimal coordinates i.e. latitude-longitude pairs is revised and improved to 5 decimals for accuracy purposes. A single-point coordinate system is applied throughout the archive. The coordinates were placed on a wellknown infrastructure it impacted such as hospitals, convenience stores, or schools etc. within the area of interest. However, difficult cases were tallied only on the town-level in which a severe weather event (SWE) occurred and seen,




Added additional columns e.g. island partitions, designated month and year, and a status indicator whether the documentions as attached is (a) Active, (b) Preserved - for newspapers mostly, and (c) Inactive,




Significant uptick to the number of SWEs. Exhaustively reviewed/checked each cases. However, some older cases still requires checking and extensive researching in other repositories e.g. libraries etc. This will be another goal over the next update(s)/major releases, 




An article/preprint is now available in arXiv acting as a foundational paper of Project SWAP and is imported to this page. We also devised a 'Hail Scale' that can be used as an initial guideline based from previous researches. To check this simple hail scale, kindly view/read the preprint as attached in this release,




On the EF ratings of tornadoes, these were initial ratings from careful considerations throughout the project based on presented evidences from the documentation columns. A more thorough and rigorous survey/assessment is REQUIRED to rectify these initial ratings. On the other hand, most of the waterspouts were rated as EF0 with confidence,




SWAP DR2 also feature proximity rawinsonde observations (RAOBs or proximity sounding profiles) from few cases as queried and analyzed through SounderPy of Gillett (2024). Please see the zip file attached in this posting. A CSV and CM1 input file of these soundings will also be included over the next incremental update soon, and




A technical report will also be available soon for Project SWAP. 



This project can be important to uncovering the Philippine's convective and kinematic setting on various timescales, essentially creating a climatological baseline to further understand both mesoscale processes and long term climate linkages. However, any analyses using this archive will require careful consideration of biases therein, many of which we have discussed in the preprint attached in this release.

File inclusion of SWAP DR2; 





3 standard CSV file formats containing tornadoes, hail, and waterspout reports (can easily imported to Pandas or GeoPandas),




3 documentation files containing hyperlinks/sources/evidences. Our OFFICIAL LOGO is also unveiled in these documentations. This includes few, basic data visualization of each severe weather phenomena,




2 zip files containing SWAP DR2's proximity soundings (either observed or from ERA5 Reanalysis queried in SounderPy as mentioned before), limited to several cases of tornadoes and hail events, and 




A preprint manuscript tackling SWAP DR2 and establishing a Climatological Baseline for Severe Weather Events in the Philippines. We are aiming to have the paper be published to a journal as well. 



Kindly see the table below for the versions of Project SWAP and other details. If you have comments, kindly use the SWAP Contact Form below. 






Indexing number of Versions



Description



w/ Zenodo DOI?



Is it citable? 





Version 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and so on...



Major Data Release/Major Update



Yes



Yes*





Version 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and so on...



Incremental Update/Patch



Yes



Yes*





Version x.x.1, x.x.2, x.x.3, and so on...



Announcement



Yes



No





*Note: You can just cite all the versions for your ease. See the Additional Description. 
description: No. of Severe Weather Events: 596*






Before 2010



2010



2011



2012



2013



2014



2015



2016



2017



2018



2019



2020



2021



2022



2023



2024



2025





68



5



17



20



31



28



28



14



26



19



36



47



40



71



52



94



-





*As of September 2, 2024. Past years/events/cases, including their supporting evidences, remains difficult to scour/dig around. 

If you use this dataset/archive, kindly cite either of the following;

Capuli, G. H. (2024). Project Severe Weather Archive of the Philippines (SWAP). Part 1: Establishing a Baseline Climatology for Severe Weather across the Philippine Archipelago. arXiv e-prints. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2409.03211

or

Capuli, G. H. (2024). Project Severe Weather Archive of the Philippines (SWAP). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11236890

You can contact me through this form: SWAP Contact Form or through the email.