Objective Tracking of Tropical Cyclones and their Impact on Relevant Wind Fields in the West-Pacific for Construction of Physically Consistent Event Sets

Tropical cyclone activity usually negatively affects people’s lives in coastal countries, especially in East-Asia including China. In order to reduce the effect, various approaches are utilized to study tropical cyclones. The Murray and Simmonds Cyclone Tracking algorithm, which has been mainly used in tracking extratropical cyclones, is, for the first time, applied to detect and track tropical cyclones in the West-Pacific based on mean sea level pressure data. Since this algorithm only requires one variable field as input, if it would achieve similar performance as other more complex tracking algorithms, this could be a good algorithm to use for construction of large physically consistent tropical cyclone event sets.

In the presentation, a preliminary evaluation on the performance of the Murray and Simmonds Cyclone Tracking algorithm on tracking tropical cyclones in West-Pacific, using ERA5 and IBTrACS, will be presented. The sensitivity of the performance of the algorithm on different parameter settings will also be discussed. Furthermore, the added value of combining the Murray and Simmonds Cyclone Tracking algorithm and an impact-based storm tracking algorithm, WiTRACK, from the disaster risk reduction and mitigation perspective will also be demonstrated.