Applications & Visualizations of the Historical Database

This page contains links to validation plots comparing the various parameters of the new historical database to HURDAT2/Best Track parameters. This page also provides links to plots that explore the relationships between various parameters.

Plots comparing the Best Track/HURDAT2 parameter, available aircraft observations, and the new TC-OBS parameters

Each plot shows the 6-hourly/1-hourly interpolated value of the HURDAT/Best Track parameter (black/orange lines, respectively), the associated uncertainty bounds of the Best Track values (thin black lines), the new observations-based parameter values (TC-OBS, thick green line), time-dependent uncertainty bounds (thin green lines), and the actual aircraft observations that the TC-OBS parameter is based on (filled red triangles for flight level wind speeds reduced to surface equivalent, filled blue triangles for SFMR surface wind speeds). When there are no observations near the time of interest, the TC-OBS parameter relaxes back to the HURDAT/Best Track value, and the uncertainty bounds relax back to uncertainty values given in Table 2 of Landsea and Franklin (2013). More details on the methods used have been provided in an extended abstract from the 32nd Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology.

NOTE: the following validation plots are provided for v0.40 of the database, built 20160119.

• Track Plots (includes additional zoomed plots for each landfall)
• Plots for cyclones with observational refinement
• Plots for all cyclones in the database (including storms with no observational refinement)
• Intensity Plots (includes an alternative intensity metric: azimuthal mean wind speed)
• Plots for cyclones with observational refinement
• Plots for all cyclones in the database (including storms with no observational refinement)
• Radius of Maximum Wind (RMW) Plots
• Plots for cyclones with observational refinement
• Plots for all cyclones in the database (including storms with no observational refinement)
• Wind Radii Plots (includes plots for each of the following wind speed thresholds: 34-kt, 50-kt, 64-kt, 83-kt, 96-kt, 113-kt, and 137-kt, as well as a combined plot showing the wind radii for all wind speed thresholds)
• Plots for cyclones with observational refinement (see note below)
• Plots for all cyclones in the database (including storms with no observational refinement)

NOTE: For the wind radii parameter, most cyclones prior to 2004 do not have observational refinement because the Air Force data files do not include the flight level pressure. In most cases, it is possible to construct the flight level pressure from other data parameters. We hope to do this in a follow-on project.

Plots exploring the relationships between various parameters

The plots in this section explore the relationships between the estimated meteorlogical accuracy of the VDM fixes and various parameters such as time, intensity, environmental vertical wind shear, sea surface temperature, translation speed, and radius of maximum winds.

• Exploratory plots

This page was last updated 03 October 2018 by Jonathan Vigh.