Where the reports come from

The source

National Weather Service forecast offices issue Local Storm Reports (LSRs) when trusted observers report what they see: trained SKYWARN spotters, emergency managers, 911 centres, police and fire, CoCoRaHS volunteers, automated weather stations, broadcast media and the public. Five offices cover Ohio: Cleveland, Wilmington, OH, Pittsburgh, Charleston, WV and Northern Indiana.

Storm Ledger reads those reports from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet (Iowa State University), which archives every NWS LSR product and publishes them as open data. NWS products are U.S. government works in the public domain.

How the ledger is kept

• Every 15 minutes the newest 72 hours of Ohio reports are read again, so late reports and corrections are caught.
• Each report is stored once. NWS offices repeat reports in end-of-event summaries; a repeat with the same time, place, event and wording is matched to the first copy, and a later product's corrected wording or measurement replaces the earlier one.
• The event name, place, measurement, source and remarks are kept exactly as the NWS wrote them. Storm Ledger only adds the kind (for colour and filters), the Ohio calendar day and the county it matched by name. A report whose county is not written as an Ohio county name (a typo, or a Lake Erie marine zone) keeps its county as written and appears only in the all-Ohio lists.
• Times are shown in Ohio time (EDT or EST). Days run midnight to midnight, Ohio time.
• Distances in lookups are great-circle miles from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2024 Gazetteer centre point of the place you pick.

Limits worth knowing

• Reports are preliminary. NWS damage surveys may later confirm a tornado, change its rating or rule it out; the report here stays as it was issued.
• A report shows where an observer was. Most damage is never reported, and rural areas get fewer reports.
• For the checked record use NOAA's Storm Events Database, usually complete about three months after the month ends.

The ledger holds 28,364 Ohio reports from January 1, 2021 to today.

Who runs it

Storm Ledger is an independent site built and run by WeldonPC. Storm Ledger is an independent site. It is not run by, or affiliated with, the National Weather Service, NOAA, the Iowa Environmental Mesonet, any Ohio county or any news organization. It does no reporting of its own, writes no stories and uses no AI.