Tropical cyclones wind swaths

Climate Wikience is able to generate wind swaths (footprints) for tropical cyclones.

Watch the interactive exploration of Hurricane Iniki wind swath using Climate Wikience. Iniki stroke Hawaii in 1992 being the 3rd costliest Pacific hurricane on history (estimated cost: $3.03 billion for 2015).

Swaths Collection

View the collection of tropical hurricanes swaths.

Comparison to alternative data

The H*Wind company provides wind speed snapshots for tropical huricanes (hurricane wind speed for a particular date). Some wind swaths are freely available for the selected parts of several well-known hurricanes (e.g. land deployment). Below is the comparison table of H*Wind vs Climate Wikience tropical storm wind footprints.

    H*Wind   Climate Wikience
Spatial resolution   1 min   0.25° × 0.25° (15 min)
Temporal resolution   3 hours   1 hour
Spatial coverage   Atlantic basin   Global
Temporal coverage   1994—current   1979—current
Swath readily available   NO   YES
Wind speed snapshots   Some dates for a hurricane   Full hurricane lifetime
Interactive swath exploration   NO   3D visualization
Auxiliary data   NO   700+ variables
Output format   SHP, TXT Grid, NetCDF   CSV, NetCDF, GeoTIFF
Isolines   Image   Interactive
Accuracy (*)   StarIcon StarIcon StarIcon StarIcon StarIcon_half   StarIcon StarIcon StarIcon_half

(*) DISCLAIMER. Climate Wikience tropical cyclone wind swaths (footprints) are not a commercial but experimental research product. It has less accuracy, though, has a quite good agreement with H*Wind data. Although methods used for producing wind speed swaths by Climate Wikience could be improved in the future, use Climate Wikience swaths as a complementary data to H*Wind products. E.g. for ocean basins (global, except Atlantic) and time period (1979—1994) where H*Wind data are not available (for other ocean basins or prior 1994).

Useful links