Our Products

We generate and deliver large numbers of synthetic tropical cyclone tracks, with storm surge information if desired, affecting any part of the world. The tracks are specified to pass within a given distance of a specified point of interest, or to pass over any of a set of user-defined line segments. They may be generated from any of six different climate reanalysis data sets, going back as early as 1891 and extending as recently as last year, or from any of six CMIP5 global climate models run over historical intervals dating back as far as 1850 and extending to the year 2005, and run forward to the year 2100 under IPCC emissions pathways RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5.

Fifty of a set of many thousands of WindRiskTech tropical cyclone tracks affecting Tacloban in the Philippines, downscaled from NCAR/NCEP reanalysis for the period 1980-2012.

What You Get

Wind events

Our event sets are delivered as Excel spreadsheets or MATLAB (or OCTAVE) binary files. For each track, the following quantities are provided every two hours:

  • Storm number

  • Year

  • Month

  • Day of the month

  • Hour (UTC)

  • Latitude of storm center

  • Longitude of storm center

  • Maximum circular component of the 1-minute sustained wind speed at 10 m altitude

  • Maximum ground-relative 1-minute sustained wind speed at 10 m altitude (this includes a factor related to storm translation speed)

  • Radius of maximum surface winds

  • Maximum circular component of any secondary wind maxima that may be present

  • Maximum ground-relative component of any secondary wind maxima that may be present

  • Radii of maximum surface winds of any secondary wind maxima that may be present

  • Central surface pressure

  • 850 hPa-250 hPa environmental wind shear

  • Potential intensity

  • 850 hPa environmental wind components

  • 600 hPa environmental temperature

  • 600 hPa environmental relative humidity

    • Time history of the maximum peak ground relative 1-minute sustained wind at 10 m of the most intense among 12,000 North Atlantic WindRiskTech events, representing a roughly 1000 year return period storm. The red curves show evolutions of secondary wind maxima.


    Surge events

    Surges are typically provided in a variety of formats using SLOSH, ADCIRC, and Windrisktech’s FastSurge models. Wave coupling with SWAN for inundation studies can also be provided. The data we provide include:


    1. Surge cumulative density functions, histograms or return period charts. One file per event set, containing an empirical cumulative distribution function of surge height and 95% upper and lower confidence bounds.

    2. A single file of peak surge per event set at customer specified lat-long points interpolated from available model resolution, containing storm number, latitude, longitude, and peak surge height

    3. A single file of storm surge for each event at specified lat-long points interpolated from available model resolution and time step.

    Peak surge amplitude associated with a WindRiskTech event that affects the coasts of New Hampshire and southern Maine, downscaled from NCAR/NCEP reanalyses. An empirical cumulative distribution function of peak surge heights at Seabrook, New Hampshire, is shown in the upper right corner.


    Rain events

    The distribution of rainfall around a tropical cyclone cannot usually be reconstructed from a small number of storm parameters as is the case with the wind field. WindRiskTech's methods account for the effects of boundary layer drag, ambient wind shear, internal storm dynamics, and topography on the rainfall distribution. Rather than distribute extremely large data sets that would include the spatial and temporal distributions of rain in each of the many thousands of events we generate, we instead provide exceedance probabilities of rainfall rates and accumulated storm rainfall for any user-specified point.

    Return periods of accumulated storm rainfall at Tacloban calculated from 3100 WindRiskTech tropical cyclone tracks, downscaled from NCAR/NCEP reanalysis for the period 1980-2012.


    Software

    We provide an extensive set of MATLAB-based analysis scripts for calculating return periods of wind and rain, plotting individual tracks and groups of tracks, analyzing genesis and track densities and the seasonality of events, and many other aspects of our tropical cyclone events.

    Peak winds (left, in knots) and storm accumulated rainfall (right, in mm) for a 50,000 year event in New England. In each panel, the black curve shows the track of the storm center.


    Comparisons with historical tracks

    WindRiskTech's MATLAB-based software includes an up-to-date global database of historical tropical cyclones which can be used to perform detailed comparisons between WindRiskTech synthetic events and historical events.

    Exceedance frequencies of storm lifetime maximum wind in the North Atlantic based on 13,000 WindRiskTech synthetic events (maroon) and 499 historical events between 1970 and 2013 (blue). Green error bars show confidence intervals within which 90% of the historical tracks should lie were they drawn from the same distribution as the synthetic tracks.


    Base 10 logarithm of the probability density of tropical cyclone intensification and decay rates from over 300,000 WindRiskTech 2-hour data (red) and about 3,500 historical 6-hour data, both from the North Atlantic region.


    Consultations

    WindRiskTech's staff are available on an hourly basis for consultations, report writing, and other tasks. For more information, contact us at Info@WindRiskTech.com