A curated shortlist of 20 high-value open datasets and feeds — 6 weather and climate, 7 flooding and water, 7 climate-disaster risk — compiled 8 October 2026 from 5,589 web results examined across the three topics. It is a representative catalogue, not an exhaustive census; update cadence runs from hourly to irregular, and “open access” does not always mean an open licence.
Operational feeds. For live decisions, HRRR refreshes hourly over the US, ECMWF’s AIFS models run four times daily worldwide, GPM IMERG delivers half-hourly global precipitation, and Copernicus GFM maps floods from Sentinel-1 within 8 hours, alongside GloFAS 30-day flood forecasts.
Long-run archives. For history and trends, ERA5 reanalysis reaches back to 1940, IBTrACS holds tropical-cyclone tracks to the 19th century, and EM-DAT records 22,000 disasters since 1900 across 180 countries.
Strategic risk layers. For planning, the annual INFORM Risk Index (CC BY 4.0) ranks country-level crisis risk with projections to 2080, ND-GAIN scores 192 countries on climate vulnerability since 1995, and WRI’s Aqueduct atlas maps water risk at catchment level, revised every 4–5 years.
| Category | Dataset | Publisher | Licence / terms | Update cadence | Coverage | Source |
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Method: curated comparison of 20 open weather, flood and climate-disaster-risk datasets — one row per dataset family with publisher, stated licence or terms, update cadence, coverage and access route — backed by 20 distinct source URLs across 14 hosts, researched 8 October 2026. Search passes examined 5,589 web-result rows across the three topics before curation (not cross-pass deduplicated). Cadence tiers and licence classes in the matrix are editorial readings of each source’s stated terms; licence and coverage text is condensed for space — re-check the linked terms before operational or commercial use. This is a shortlist, not a census of every regional or specialist dataset.