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Input data set: Tropical cyclone (TC) data



Protocol relation: Protocol
Data Type: Observed/Historical climate
Simulation rounds: ISIMIP3a
Description:

Historical tropical cyclone (TC) tracks, with associated gridded wind and rain fields, as well as wind exposure in terms of i) national territory affected by extreme wind speeds, ii) people exposed to extreme wind speeds, and iii) economic assets affected by extreme wind speeds.

Includes all TCs from the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) over the period 1950-2021.

All gridded datasets are provided on a regular grid with 300 arc-seconds (1/12 degree, approximately 10 km) resolution. Temporal resolution is 3-hourly for along-track variables, and hourly for gridded variables. Additionally, gridded wind and rain fields are provided in time-aggregated form, as maximum wind speed values, and maximum 24-hourly rainfall totals, taken over the entire duration of each TC event. Wind exposure data is provided per country.

Scenarios: 2015soc, histsoc, obsclim
Variables: wind, pres, 34knassets, 48knassets, 64knassets, 96knassets, penv, windlifetimemax, lat, lon, windspatialmax, max_rain, 34knarea, 48knarea, 64knarea, 96knarea, 34knpop, 48knpop, 64knpop, 96knpop, basin, rmw, roci, t600, rain, u850, v850
Specifications

The dataset contains processed track information of historical tropical cyclones (TCs) from 1950 to 2021. The information is derived from the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS), the most comprehensive global dataset of historical TC activity as reported by the WMO Regional Specialised Meteorological Centers (RSMCs). Missing values in the data are estimated using statistical relationships and interpolation. The 600 hPa temperature and 850 hPa wind speeds are taken from the ECMWF reanalysis version 5 (ERA5).

Gridded wind speeds are derived from the track data using two parametric wind profiles: ER11 (Emanuel and Rotunno 2011 https://doi.org/10.1175/JAS-D-10-05024.1) and H08 (Holland 2008 https://doi.org/10.1175/2008MWR2395.1). Gridded rain fields are derived from the track data using the physics-based model TCR (Zhu et al. 2013 https://doi.org/10.1002/2013GL058284).

The exposure of territory, population, and economic assets is derived from the estimated wind fields and historical population and GDP distributions, which are ISIMIP3a input data.

Data source

The main source dataset (IBTrACS) is described in Knapp et al. 2010 https://doi.org/10.1175/2009BAMS2755.1. For other datasets that went into the computation of wind and rain fields, and exposed assets, see Frieler et al. 2024 https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-17-1-2024.

Download Instructions

For ISIMIP participants, these files are available for download on the DKRZ cluster server using the path: /work/bb0820/ISIMIP/ISIMIP3a/InputData/climate/tropical_cyclones/

DOI
For more information and how to cite this dataset, please follow the DOI: https://doi.org/10.48364/ISIMIP.605192




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