Tropical Reanalysis: Why and How?

Tropical Reanalysis: Why and How?
Presented by Lourdes B. Avilés, Ph.D.

1:25 p.m. – 1:45 p.m.

The Atlantic Hurricane Database (HURDAT in its original format, and now HURDAT2), was originally just a collection of observations of tropical cyclone position, pressure, and wind speed kept since the 1880s gathered together for convenience during the 1960s. Over the years the data has become the ultimate source of historical Atlantic (and eastern Pacific) hurricane data, and it has been used for a variety of climatological studies. The problem is that there have been a lot of changes over the years in how hurricanes and other tropical systems are observed and classified, and there have been many technological advances, all of which produced artificial changes in the data that can be misconstrued. The Hurricane Reanalysis Project has been ongoing since 2001, systematically applying consistent analysis techniques to the available tropical cyclone data in order to update the Hurricane Database, which currently extends from 1851 to 2021. We will highlight the history of HURDAT/2 and the Hurricane Reanalysis Project, and learn how those working on reanalyzing the data do it. We will also see a few before and after examples.