TRACK is advanced feature-tracking software for weather, climate and ocean data.
Overview
TRACK is developed by Kevin Hodges to perform feature tracking in gridded data based on spectrally filtered fields. TRACK can be applied to atmospheric and oceanic data to detect cyclones, blocking, waves, eddies and other features. TRACK also provides various analysis utilities, such as cyclone-centred sampling, cyclone phase-space computation, and feature-density calculations. TRACK was originally developed in the 1990s, and described across several Monthly Weather Review papers. Development has continued since, and TRACK analysis underpins numerous scientific contributions, including evaluation of global reanalyses, widely used HighResMIP datasets, collaboration with private-sector partners, and new datasets to supplement observational records of European windstorms and tropical cyclones globally.
Literature
Hodges, K. I., A General Method for Tracking Analysis and Its Application to Meteorological Data. Monthly Weather Review 122, 2573–2586 (1994).
Hodges, K. I., Feature Tracking on the Unit Sphere. Monthly Weather Review 123, 3458–3465 (1995).
Hodges, K. I., Spherical Nonparametric Estimators Applied to the UGAMP Model Integration for AMIP. Monthly Weather Review 124, 2914–2932 (1996).
Hodges, K. I., Adaptive Constraints for Feature Tracking. Monthly Weather Review 127, 1362–1373 (1999).
Hodges, K. I. et al., How Well Are Tropical Cyclones Represented in Reanalysis Datasets? Journal of Climate 30, 5243–5264 (2017).