TCGP v2.5 Release Notes

Release date: 20 Aug 2021

Preamble

TCGP was created back in 2004 as a simple web resource to view model guidance for work Jonathan Vigh was doing for his Masters thesis on ensemble forecasting of tropical cyclone track at Colorado State University. Following the hyperactive 2005 season in which TCGP received millions of hits per month, Jonathan put a bit more effort into improving the graphics and reliability of the site. When Dr. Vigh became a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Advanced Study Program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), he decided to transition the site over to NCAR and make it into a formal project, in the hopes of building the next generation capabilities and giving the project some more longevity. The first formal TCGP site at NCAR was launched in Fall of 2010 (v1.0). During 2010-2011, additional upgrades were made to improve the reliability of the data processing, add in many new source of model data, and expand the site to cover the other global basins (Western Pacific, North Indian Ocean, Southern Hemisphere). TCGP v2.0 was completed and launched in Fall 2011. After that, TCGP codes remained largely static and largely unchanged apart from a few improvements, such as adding regionalized links (2015/2016), adding links to radars and other external content (2016/2017), and adding an experimental curve boxplot product (2017). In 2019, a minor change was made to support the nomenclature of NHC's Potential Tropica Cyclones'.

Since the last update in 2019, numerous changes have occurred which resulted in broken links on TCGP's individual storm pages, issues with the data (including some missing data for Western Pacific storms), and issues with TCGP's graphical products. While TCGP's codes were state-of-the-art for 2011, there were significant inflexibilities which, until remedied, made further upgrades difficult. Meanwhile, in 2018-2019, several projects arose with needs that were synergistic with TCGP's next stage of development. These projects provided an opportunity to undertake a major upgrade of TCGP.

Funding

Over the past three years, TCGP has been indirectly supported by several projects that its capabilities are supporting. These include:

• University Corporation for Atmospheric Research's President's Strategic Initiative ($120,000, 2019 - 2021)
• NOAA HFIP project ($339,571, 2018 - 2022, NA18NWS4680058
• NOAA HFIP Ensemble RI project (2017 - 2021)
• NCAR Early Career Faculty Innovator Program (2021 - 2023)

The development undertaken in support of these projects has made this major v2.5 upgrade release possible.

Changes to TCGP's code infrastructure

• Completed a massive overhaul of the source code and scripts, including adding capability to control program paths and behavior through configuration files.
• Created ability for TCGP to be installed and setup on any server in a matter of minutes.
• Created a full realtime-beta instance of TCGP to provide a full operational parallel test environment for new capabilities.
• Improved reliability of data scripts and made them flexible in order to handle a variety of scenarios for data permissions.
• Fixed bugs which had previously caused issues in TCGP's scripts.
• Ported TCGP's data infrastructure to run in the cloud (Amazon Web Service) under a serverless architecture.
• Developed an API for the provision of TCGP data for mobile infrastructure applications.
• Developed the HurricaneRiskCalculator web app to demonstrate new location-based wind hazard and wind risk applications.

Changes to TCGP's ATCF data repository

• Added new data feeds from JTWC via their Collaboration Site. The public instance of TCGP now includes TCVITALS and CARQ data obtained directly from JTWC (previously, these were constructed from TCVITALS obtained from the NCEP NOMADS server).
• Changed the individual data directories to store all adecks in subdirectories by year. Whereas previously, several years' worth of adecks may have been under the top-level model subdirectory, now these will be stored in subdirectories under each year (e.g., model/2021). Note that the 'adecks_open', 'bdecks_open', and 'tcvitals_open' will still contain the respective data files at the top level.

Major expansion of TCGP's focus to include probabilistic wind hazards

As part of TCGP's long-stated goal of moving the community beyond track and intensity, TCGP has expanded its offerings to provide wind hazard outputs from the Forecasts of Hurricanes using Large-ensemble Outputs (FHLO)* model. FHLO was developed over the past decade by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as part of a joint MIT-NCAR project funded by the NOAA Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project. FHLO was developed by MIT PhD student Jonathan Lin and MIT Prof. Kerry Emanuel. FHLO provides wind hazard outputs that leverage the rich diversity of dynamical information contained in global ensembles, allowing FHLO to handle forecast situations such as track and intensity bifurcations that traditional probabilistic methods cannot handle. FHLO has been running in real-time at NCAR since 2019. This upgrade makes the FHLO graphical (spatial) wind hazard outputs available on TCGP for the first time. For more information about FHLO, please see the TCGP's model documentation page for FHLO. For more about the wind hazard plots, please see TCGP's Guide to Probabilistic Wind Hazard Plots.

^*The data incorporated herein is generated from the use of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Forecasts of Hurricanes Using Large-ensemble Outputs (FHLO) version 1.50, © MIT, used with permission. All Rights Reserved.

Changes to TCGP's graphical products

• Removed the curve box plot track product.
• Removed the late stream 1.5 (experimental) products for intensity and track (these were related to the HFIP stream 1.5 from several years back).
• Removed the GFS ensemble track product (this is being replaced with a new suite of diagnostic products).
• Removed NGX2, EGR2, CMC2, and NVG2 from the various track and intensity plots (these are 12-h old plots, and thus detract from what the current model guidance is showing).
• Added new probabilistic wind hazard plots from FHLO*.

Changes to links to external products

• Removed links to SSD satellite products (SAB no longer produces these).
• Updated broken links to the external CIRA and CIMSS products.
• Updated broken links for the NOAA National Weather Service radars (these now point to a RIDGE-lite interim radar reflectivity products).