location and intensity of maximum wind speed (m/s) for each tropical cyclone identified and tracked in the forecast.
ECMWF's TC track are produced only for tropical cyclones where an observation report is present at the analysis time.
Resolution
Unchanged
Horizontal
Vertical
Horizontal (unchanged)
Atmospheric
HRES: T1279
ENS: Leg A T639, Leg B T319, Leg C T255
Wave
HRES: 0.25 degrees
ENS: 0.5 degrees
Vertical (unchanged)
Atmospheric
HRES: L137
ENS: L91
Technical content
The enhanced TC tracks are coded in BUFR-4 and replace the current BUFR-3 products
BUFR Section 1 changes:
edition number changes from 3 to 4;
length of section 1 changes from 18 bytes to 22 bytes.
Some steps are coded as missing values in the new product.
BUFR tables version 16 (files B0000000000000016000.TXT,D0000000000000016000.TXT and C0000000000000016000.TXT). are needed to successfully decode the new TC track products. Users that do not have these tables download the latest version of ECMWF's BUFRDC
The BUFR templates remain unchanged but missing value indicators are used to describe unavailable data entries
For compatibility reasons, TC track products archived in MARS will continue to be encoded in BUFR-3 but will include all enhancements described above.