Retrospective Guidance | About Retrospective Archive

About the Retrospective Archive

This provides an overview of TCGP's retrospective product archive. Before using this retrospective archive, it is important to understand the differences between real-time and retrospective products.

TCGP's Real-Time Guidance Archive provides products and data that were generated by TCGP in near real-time (i.e., during a tropical cyclone event). These real-time plots can be useful to users in that they show what was available via TCGP at the time of the storm. These real-time products are not updated again and they do not show the verifying data of what happened with the actual storm.

TCGP's Retrospective Product Archive provides products which have been generated after the storm event. In some cases, these products may include data which was not readily available to the public or TCGP in real-time. They could even include retrospective forecasts (e.g., forecast guidance that was run after the event). In general, the retrospective products will contain the verifying analyses (e.g, the "Best Track") for track, intensity, or wind radii. If the final, post-season Best Track data are not yet available, the operational (or so-called "working") Best Track will be used. To avoid confusion with the real-time products, there are no current plans to generate retrospective plots before a storm has ended.

Currently, TCGP has a modest amount of support from the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP) to generate retrospective visualizations related to ensemble diagnostics for rapid intensification (RI).

The retrospective product archive is stil under preparation, but when it is populated, it will be accessible here:

Retrospective product archive

Project Statuts

When will retrospective products be available?

We are aiming to have some initial retrospective products available by 05 September 2021. Initially this archive will include a suite of ensemble diagnostic plots.

How often are the retrospective products updated?

In general, these will only be updated when the underlying data have changed and there is reason to do so. For now, no regular updates of the retrospective archive are planned. Updates will be done on an as-needed basis.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.