Overview

In late 2020 this page was developed to showcase the most recent updates to the STAR SAROPS Tropical Cyclone System and to replace the original SAROPS tropical storm demonstrator. As of February, 2021, the archive has been back-filled through 2016 but the storms prior to 2019 have not been sanitized thoroughly. Please visit the original page to view the best results for those storms for the time being.

Significant Sources of Error

While the STAR SAROPS Tropical Cyclone System is designed to run autonomously, there are a few factors which may introduce erroneous initial results. A primary source of error is caused by inaccurate storm center coordinates, which are only as good as the estimates derived from the preliminary storm track observations. Secondly, in storm scenes containing areas of land, the mask may not cover the edges completely. This can lead to "land contamination" wherein coastlines are falsely interpreted as areas of high wind. Lastly, in rare instances the data feed may be missing a particular scene in a sequence for a storm observation and can cause incongruities in the combined imagery. If human intervention is needed to correct for any of these reasons, we can usually reprocess the data within a few hours, although occasionally it may take a day or more during non-business hours.

Future Plans

Many improvements are planned for 2021 and beyond. We plan to reprocess many scenes with an improved thermal noise removal procedure, which will especially impact results prior to mid-2019. We also will be implementing a more accurate methodology for calculating radial wind profiles, maximum wind speed, radius of maximum winds, and the radius of the 34, 50, and 64 knot winds.

[X] Close