Cyclone Tracks
Tropical Cyclone Track Description

What Are All These Lines??!

These lines are predicted tropical cyclone tracks, or future forecasts for the center of a storm made by forecast models. There are many lines because meteorologists use many models when making a forecast.

What is a Tropical Cyclone?

Tropical cyclones are low pressure systems, that depending on their strength and location, can be referred to as tropical depressions, tropical storms, hurricanes, typhoons, and so on. Tropical cyclones are usually smaller and more intense than non-tropical cyclones. Meteorologists care about tropical cyclone tracks since their paths can have drastic impacts on damaging wind, storm surge and flooding rains.

Okay, So What Am I Looking At?

This site plots forecasted cyclone track position (i.e. center of the storm) for all currently active tropical cyclones in the domain using a variety of atmospheric ensembles. Each tropical system is denoted with a unique ID below its current location to separate each storm's tracks from one another. The basic idea of ensemble forecasting is that the future state of weather is inherently uncertain and weather forecast models should be designed to capture that uncertainty. In other words, predicting the weather perfectly is and always will be impossible, and that weather prediction should focus on the range of possible weather outcomes rather than one single awesome forecast.

To read the tropical cyclone tracks, please look at the image on the right. This is a 2.5 day forecast for Hurricane Sandy that crippled many places from the Caribbean to the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast coast of the United States. At the time of this graphic on 10/27/12, Hurricane Sandy was positioned just north of the Bahamas. The forecast models predicted that Sandy would move north-northeast before making a sharp turn toward the west. It was during this sharp turn where most models differed on Sandy's location, with some models predicting the storm to make landfall in Delaware, while others predicted a landfall on Long Island in New York. The track coloring denotes the storm's central pressure, or intensity, with a lower pressure indicating a stronger storm. Most models predicted the storm to maintain its intensity or strengthen as it approached the coast of the U.S.

In addition to looking at every ensemble, the user can hold their mouse over the different ensemble text (i.e. GEFS, CMC, etc) to display cyclone tracks from that ensemble only. In this case, the SREF ensemble had a much stronger storm making landfall further southwest compared to the FNMOC.







Hurricane Sandy: October 29-30th 2012



ALL GEFS CMC FNMOC SREF OPER




Additional Details - The Ensemble Used

The cyclone (or storm center) positions plotted on this site consist of ALL (every forecasted model track), the Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS), the Canada Meteorological Center (CMC) Ensemble, the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC), the Short Range Ensemble Forecast System (SREF), and a collection of operational single-run models (OPER). Currently OPER only plots the United Kingdom Meteorology (UKMET) model. Future additions to OPER will include the operational Alaskan Mesoscale Forecast System (NAM), the Global Forecast System (GFS) and the operational CMC.

Additional Details - How Often Do the Tracks Update?

The modeled forecast tracks update as soon as they become available. The GEFS and SREF ensembles update four times a day from their 00 UTC, 06 UTC, 12 UTC and 18 UTC runs. The CMC, FNMOC and UKMET update twice a day from their 00 UTC and 12 UTC runs. Cyclone track data for the SREF, GEFS, UKMET, NMMOC and CMC are available about 5, 7, 7, 8, and 10 hours after model initialization, respectively.

Additional Details - What's With the Text Labels?

First of all, cyclone track data comes from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction/Environmental Model Center NCEP/EMC Cyclogenesis Tracking Page. In the track data's native format, all current tropical cyclones are denoted with a unique ID, making them easy to separate from one another. This ID is displayed below the current position of the storm to separate tropical cyclones from each other. Therefore, all currently active tropical cyclones are displayed at once. This is different from the non-tropical cyclones where each "cyclone event" is plotted separately as described in the non-tropical help section.

































Webmaster: Michael Erickson
Questions or comments? Email me: Michael.Erickson@stonybrook.edu.