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

Abstract

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