Acknowledgments

This project was initiated and developed by Dr. Jonathan Vigh as an outreach endeavor during his tenure as a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Advanced Study Program at NCAR. Support for Jonathan's postdoc appointment was provided by the Mesoscale & Microscale Meteorology (MMM) Division and the NCAR Earth Systems Laboratory (NESL), and more generally by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Development

Jonathan Vigh develops the plotting codes which produce the plots of the forecast aids. He also develops all of the site's back-end scripting and data management infrastructure. These scripts mirror the National Hurricane Center's a-decks and splice these together with other forecast aids from the various sources to create a-decks for the open-source repository. The script system also mirrors NHC's aircraft reconnaissance archive and gather together all the Vortex Data Messages for each storm, if available. The scripts then create plots to visualize the forecast aids and update the web site. Jonathan also developed all of the front-end PHP scripting that subsequently serves the data to the web user. 

Data

The forecast aids shown by this site come from a variety of modeling centers including the National Environmental Prediction Center (NCEP), the National Hurricane Center, and the UK Met Office.

Project Support

NCAR's Research Applications Laboratory (RAL) supports the project by providing the overall project management, all necessary server facilities, excellent IT support, and web development consulting. Lara Ziady provided the site's graphic design and navigation magic (CSS and PHP) with input from Jonathan Vigh. Laurie Carson provides support and consulting for the site's backend. Tor Mohling provides system administration support on IT issues.

Feedback

Valuable feedback has been provided by a number of individuals. Brian Tang (NCAR/ASP), Jordan Powers (NCAR/MMM), and Chris Davis (NCAR/MMM) provided helpful suggestions on the site's design and documentation. Rowena Ong (Vanderbilt University) contributed the idea of linking to the various documentation pages from each individual storm page. James Franklin (NOAA/NHC) provided valuable technical advice about which forecast aids to include in the early and late cycle plots.

References

Much of the technical documentation about the various forecast aids is derived from the Technical Summary of the National Hurricane Center Track and Intensity Models. Additional documentation on some of the file formats comes from the web site for the Automated Tropical Cyclone Forecast (ATCF) System.

NCAR Command Language (NCL)

All of the plots on this site are generated using NCAR Command Language (NCL), a very powerful data processing and visualization language. Jonathan thanks the NCL development team for all the assistance and consultation they have provided over the years as he developed the plotting scripts. In particular, Mary Haley has been very helpful in helping to solve many programming issues. Other very helpful assistance has been provided by Dave Brown, Rick Brownrigg, Fred Clare, Adam Phillips, Dennis Shea, and Wei Huang.

Previous Support

Before the TCGP existed, Jonathan ran a similar site at Colorado State University. He graciously acknowledges the support provided by his former advisor, Dr. Wayne Schubert, the members of the Schubert Research Group, including Rick Taft and Brian McNoldy, the Department of Atmospheric Science, the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA), and helpful advice and encouragement of Dr. Mark DeMaria and Dr. John Knaff of the NOAA/NESDIS Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch.