The International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) Project: Overview of Methods and Indian Ocean Statistics

Abstract

Despite the widespread interest in data that describes the distribution, frequency, and intensity of tropical cyclones worldwide, until recently no central repository for official data existed. Currently, there are six Regional Specialized Meteorological Center’s (RSMC) and five Tropical Cyclone Warning Centers (TCWC) that forecast and monitor each of the tropical-cyclone-prone basins worldwide. On an annual basis each center analyzes and archives best track (BT) data: information on tropical cyclone positions, intensities, as well as other related parameters. To rectify this situation, the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) Project was developed by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center under the auspices of the World Data Center for Meteorology, Asheville to collect and disseminate the historical tropical cyclone BT data from all available sources, merging the disparate data into one comprehensive dataset for the user community (Kruk et al. 2009). Unlike any other global tropical cyclone best track dataset, IBTrACS utilizes complex merging techniques, which necessarily account for the inherent differences between BT datasets while applying objective quality control procedures to flag potentially erroneous data points. Therefore, one of the primary goals of the IBTrACS project is for the data processing methods to remain open, such that desired user feedback on data quality can be collected more readily and assessed. In addition, data provenance is completely recorded in IBTrACS so that all observations and corrections, either through rigorous quality control or through user feedback, may be tracked and provided to users. This article will summarize the purpose and vision of the project, the methods used to merge the data, and discuss results of computed basin-wide tropical cyclone statistics for both the North and South Indian Ocean basins.