A Comprehensive Tropical Cyclone Observations Dataset

An extensive data set of remote and in-situ observations obtained in the vicinity of tropical cyclones (TCs) is produced within the Hurricane Research Division (HRD) of NOAA. HRD has the unique capability of collecting a wide variety of high-quality observations in and around TCs using NOAA’s Orion P-3 and Gulfstream-IV aircraft as well as a wealth of experience and expertise in the understanding and quality control of these data. Although HRD makes these data freely available to the research community, each observation type is treated separately, so that the data-sets are not uniformly formatted or arranged in time. In order to make these data more accessible to the research community, we process these and other observation types collected in and around TCs into a uniform format. The result is a comprehensive dataset of observations available in the vicinity of Atlantic and East Pacific TCs centered on 6-hourly synoptic time windows. All the observations are quality controlled and contain metadata including high- resolution time and location information as well as error estimates and data platform identification. The data include flight level and dropwindsonde observations from NOAA, USAF, Global Hawk UAS and other experiment-specific aircraft, binned radial wind observations from NOAA aircraft tail Doppler radar, atmospheric motion vectors, satellite derived temperature and moisture retrievals, GPS radio occultation retrievals, radiosonde and aircraft sounding as well as land-based radar, and ship and buoy observations. The observations are located within 10 degrees from the National Hurricane Center (NHC) best track location for each storm at each given time and arranged into individual, easy-to-interpret text files. The resulting product is suitable for use by the research community for numerical model evaluation, data assimilation, composite analysis, and basic research.