International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS)
World Data Center for Meteorology, Asheville.

Revision and release numbering

Revision numbers will be updated when processing changes would cause changes to storms from previous years. Such changes could be caused, for example, by adjustments to the merge routines. Older dataset versions should be replaced by data using the current version.

Release numbers are incremented when a the new release represents only annual updates. That is, a previous release is still valid but not up to date.

v03r04

The latest IBTrACS version includes storm data through 2011. The following is a summary of changes for v03r04. Users should read the v03r04 Changelog for complete details of all changes and updates.

  • Release date: 1 Oct 2012
  • New features
    • Best track data through 2011
    • New dataset: Typhoon Analogs - Data for historical typhoons (1945-1976) includes numerous new parameters, recently uncovered at NCDC
  • Bug fixes
    • Data
      • Removed non-developing storms that slipped in through ATCF B decks with numbers more than 49 (e.g., bal502007.dat)
      • Fixed basin discrepancy between IBTrACS-All and IBTrACS-WMO occurring for some storms
    • Shapefiles
      • Fixed ArcGIS ingest error caused by column headers having spaces.
  • Known bugs
    • New dataset causes 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).

IBTrACS v03r04 data access -- click here


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