Tropical Cyclone Input Files

For the respective tropical cyclone (TC) relative and related applications, the respective TC attributes must be specified and written to a YAML-formatted file so that the diagnostic packages can utilize the information. A script to generate this file from the relevant TC information/observation files is provided and may be executed as follows.

user@host:$ cd /path/to/ufs_tcdiags/scripts
user@host:$ ./tcinfo_yaml.py --help

Usage: tcinfo_yaml.py [-h] [-atcf] input yaml

Tropical cyclone information input files interface.

Positional Arguments:
  input       An input file, of a supported type, containing the TC information to be formatted.
  yaml        Path to the YAML-formatted TC information attributes file.

Optional Arguments:
  -h, --help  Show this help message and exit.
  -atcf       TC information collected from an ATCF (e.g., TC-vitals) formatted file.

The following TC observation data-formats are supported.

Data Format	Description/Reference
ATCF	Automated Tropical Cyclone Forecast

TC attributes may be collected from multiple sources, and the resulting YAML-formatted files may be concatenated together so that TC diagnostics may be computed using TC attributes collected from the different supported sources.

Generating the YAML-formatted files from the supported data sources is described in the remainder of this section.

ATCF Applications

An example using ATCF-formatted input files is as follows.

user@host:$ cd /path/to/ufs_tcdiags/scripts
user@host:$ ./tcinfo_yaml.py --help

Usage: tcinfo_yaml.py [-h] [-atcf] input yaml

Tropical cyclone information input files interface.

Positional Arguments:
  input       An input file, of a supported type, containing the TC information to be formatted.
  yaml        Path to the YAML-formatted TC information attributes file.

Optional Arguments:
  -h, --help  Show this help message and exit.
  -atcf       TC information collected from an ATCF (e.g., TC-vitals) formatted file.

user@host:$ ./tcinfo_yaml.py /path/to/atcf_input_file /path/to/output/tcinfo_yaml_file -atcf

Consider the following ATCF record, e.g., /path/to/atcf_input_file.

JTWC 06P ULA       20160101 0000 167S 1704W 230 032 0956 1003 0333 46 018 0148 0195 0185 0130
NHC  09C NINE      20160101 0000 027N 1781W 280 036 1001 1007 0389 15 083 -999 -999 -999 -999

The resulting YAML-formatted file, i.e., /path/to/output/tcinfo_yaml_file, is as follows.

06P:
  lat_deg: -16.7
  lon_deg: 170.4
09C:
  lat_deg: 2.7
  lon_deg: 178.1