v03r08 News

[Ken Knapp]

Dear IBTrACS User Community

v03r08 is officially released. It is a minor update from v03r07, fixing two small bugs. More information on that is on the IBTrACS status page: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ibtracs/index.php?name=status

v03r08

The latest IBTrACS version includes storm data through 2014. The following is a summary of changes for v03r07.

• Release date: 15 Jan 2016
• New features
  • Best track data through 2014
  • Two small bug fixes from v03r07
• Bug fixes
• Line shapefiles often had errant start and end lines
• In v03r07, there were five errant systems (INVESTs) in the North Atlantic that were not classified as tropical storms by NHC in HURDAT data. These were removed in v03r08.
• Known issues
  • New datasets can cause new agency ordering in CSV and netCDF files
  • Some early (pre 1950) storms were not correctly matched, so the number of storms in the record is artificially high. For example, SIO storms in 1901 are not matched, so ds824/td9636/reunion all track one storm, but is not identified as the same storm, so 3 separate tracks are created (due to temporal differences in the stormdata).

Note

The IBTrACS team will use this thread to announce any major errors or issues noticed in v03r08. We do not plan any new updates until the next IBTrACS release, which would include the best track data from calendar year 2015.