StormR: An R package to quantify and map the tropical storms and cyclones’ winds characteristics

StormR is an R package allowing the easy extraction of storm track data from a provided database and the generation of surface wind fields (speed and direction) as reconstructed from storm track data and a parametric cyclone model. Then StormR allows us to compute three summary statistics (the maximum sustained wind speed, the power dissipation index, and the duration of exposure to winds reaching a given wing speed along the cyclone life span) and to plot the results. We suggest to use the IBTrACS (International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship) database as input (Knapp et al., 2010, 2018). This database provides a fairly comprehensive record of tropical storms and cyclones with a 3-hours temporal resolution since 1841. However any storm track data can be used as long as the mandatory fields are provided. Storm track data can be extracted using a specified point location, a user defined spatial polygon shapefile, a country or a cyclone basin name. The main functions of the StormR package allow us to generate wind speed and direction fields as reconstructed from storm track data and a parametric cyclone model. Different models and models combinations can be chosen by the user. By default the spatial resolution is set to 2.5 min (~4.5 km at the equator), but a finer spatial resolution of 30 s (~1 km at the equator) and coarser spatial resolutions of 5 min (~9 km at the equator) or 10 min (~18.6 km at the equator) can be set. The temporal resolution is set to 1 hour by default but finer resolutions of 45 min, 30 min, or 15 min can be set. Once wind speed is generated for each cell or specific location and each time step, StormR functions can compute summary statistics on wind speed over the lifespan of a storm. Summary statistics encompass the maximum sustained wind speed, the power dissipation index or total power dissipated by a tropical storm (Emanuel, 1999, 2005), and the duration of exposure to winds reaching defined speed thresholds. By default the duration of exposure is computed for each Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale threshold values for tropical cyclone categories, i.e., 33, 43, 50, 58, and 70 𝑚.𝑠−1 (Simpson, 1974), but can be defined by the user.

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Delaporte Baptiste, Arsouze Thomas, Keppel Gunnar, Jullien Swen, Menkes Christophe, Ibanez Thomas (2024). StormR: An R package to quantify and map the tropical storms and cyclones’ winds characteristics. Journal of Open Source Software. 9 (93). 5766 (5p.). https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.05766, https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00871/98341/

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