Data stewardship of global tropical cyclone best tracks

At present, primarily two centers (JTWC & NOAA/NHC) provide best track information for the worlds oceans. Each research group or individual interested in global tropical cyclone statistics must merge these data by identifying storms which are repeated in multiple basins, performing quality control and making recommended adjustments. This process is prone to errors and depends largely on the completeness of the methods of the researcher. Thus, there is a need for an operational center to take over the responsibilities of these tasks through data stewardship. In doing so, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) would create a global best track data set, thereby performing thorough quality checks and careful analysis to correct errors as needed. Such methods need to be open to public critique and completely documented for data provenance. The resulting data set should be provided in the most accessible manner to the user community. The NCDC can be this leader of global tropical cyclone data stewardship, hence removing the need for each user/researcher to merge the data set, and in so doing, reducing the potential for errors.