The JPL Tropical Cyclone Information System: A Wealth of Data for Quickly Advancing the Physical Understanding and Forecasting of Hurricanes.

Today there are still many unanswered questions about the processes that determine hurricane genesis and evolution. Furthermore, a significant amount of work remains to be done in validating and improving hurricane models. While the track forecast has improved significantly over the last couple of decades, the accuracy of the intensity forecast is still insufficient.

The critical pathways to hurricane forecast improvement are: i) increased understanding of the physical processes; ii) validation and improvement of the hurricane models; iii) development of new techniques for assimilation of satellite observations inside the hurricane precipitating core.

The wealth of satellite and airborne observations available today can be brought to bear on addressing these issues. However, these data are still underutilized in hurricane research and operations, due to their complexity.

To address this shortcoming, we developed the Tropical Cyclone Information System (TCIS), a hurricane-specific Data Analytic Center Framework which integrates model forecasts with multi-parameter satellite and airborne observations from a variety of instruments and platforms and provides an interactive system for visualization and on-line analysis tools that work with both observations and models, allowing quick investigation of the storm structure and evolution.

TCIS includes three interactive portals covering different space/time domains - the North Atlantic Hurricane Watch and two portals supporting field campaigns to study tropical convection: NASA's 2017 CPEX and the 2019 CAMP2Ex. TCIS also includes a 12-year global data archive (TCDA) of satellite observations of tropical cyclones. It provides a one-stop place to obtain an extensive set of multi-parameter data from multiple observing systems. It offers both digital data and imagery, subset to the domain and time of interest, thus greatly reducing the volume of unwanted data. This makes the TCDA a valuable source to quickly build statistics in support of research, forecast improvement and algorithm development.

In this presentation we will describe the TCIS and all its components. We will illustrate how the interactive portals can be utilized. We will also summarize pilot studies carried out recently, to encourage more users to take full advantage of the new capabilities.