IBTrACS Q&A - Dimensions

[Wishnie, Eric B CIV USN FLENUMMETOCCEN CA (USA)]

Good morning,

 

With regards to IBTrACS netCDF, I’m not sure how to apply the dimension date_time in pulling data from variables. Can you elaborate on what it is supposed to signify? Thank you very much.

 

V/r,

 

Eric Wishnie

N37 Climatology

Fleet Numerical Meteorology & Oceanography Center, Monterey CA

COM: 831-658-1206

[Jennifer Gahtan - NOAA Federal]

Hi Eric,

Within the IBTrACS netCDF files, the dimension date_time represents the timesteps or track points within each individual storm. It's currently set to 360 timesteps to allow for the longest storm, though the end values will be missing for shorter storms. Each variable that changes over the storm's lifecycle (e.g. time, lat) will have a value for a particular storm (represented by the storm dimension) and the timestep within the storm (represented by the date_time dimension).

Hopefully this helps, but feel free to reach out if you need further clarification.

-Jennifer

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Jennifer Gahtan, Ph.D.

Physical Scientist
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[Wishnie, Eric B CIV USN FLENUMMETOCCEN CA (USA)]

Thanks for the quick response. That does help a lot. Just one more clarification question: how long is each time step?

 

-Eric

[Jennifer Gahtan - NOAA Federal]

Most of the timesteps are every 3 hours (usually interpolated from the 6 hourly data provided by most centers as documented in the iflag variable) though there are occasional extra timesteps for landfall, etc.

-Jennifer