Dear all, I’m not sure where this is going, but I’ve been struggling with Luigi’s idea of “missing the peaks”, the fact that many people do not know where to look for storm information beyond tropical storms (there are a couple or recent papers with storm catalogs that are very useful, so maybe that solves this… but it is mostly based on models: how to we gather all the observation data to figure out how good or bad the models really are? ), and the fact that the general public does not care much about wave science. Yes, I am a bit frustrated that any time I mention that I work on waves, people ask me about freak waves. So I was thinking: what if anybody had a storm with his name? That could be a fun thing to talk about in schools for outreach projects. It would also help us discuss the different really cool events for which we are getting more and more data now.
Possibly, this could be just one piece of the infragravity wave initiative presented by Yaron Toledo at WISE : starting with the strongest storms, we are going to start with the longest swells, reaching up to 27 s, hence overlapping with what we usually call the “IG band”. I have funding for an engineer to help support the first 12 months of this (look for the job ad here: Engineer position at LOPS: using SWOT data to characterize extreme storms ).
On the physics side, there are very open questions on wind sea to swell transition, swell dissipation, directional distribution of waves in storms … that are shaping the swell fields and defining the “ocean swell fields” in a way similar to the big bang physics shaping the cosmic microwave background.
And yes, this is an area where SWOT data can transform our field, and SAR imagery can be re-interpreted in fruitful ways.
My first two steps will thus be to find volunteers to help, maybe cancel this if anybody else is already doing it, and start two documents:
a google doc to start organizing this and coordinate with the infragravity wave group
a pair of google sheet with the list named storms and a list of names available for naming storms (and possible constraints on the storm to be named)… hopefully tomorrow.
My first storm on that list has been re-named “Rosemary” in the honor of Rosemary Morrow, one of the co-PIs of the SWOT satellite mission, and, to the point, a specialist of Southern Ocean currents. And I’m working on making different bits and pieces of the related data available: In situ buoy data for June 6 2023 storm "Rosemary"
Hello, I start with a big thank you to Marine De Carlo for adapting a storm tracking code to just track wave height maxima.
Here is the first version of the TOP500 catalog for 1994-2023 (based on wave modeled maximum Hs value, I will add the ERA5 values shortly … but more interestingly, observable proxies for storm intensity …
If somebody has a catalog of storm names, I can try to match these. But I’m pretty sure that most of these storms are not named (yet). So … if you have ideas for matching names and storms, I’m all ears.
Hi Fabrice,
I love everything about this. 100% agree, we should be naming otherwise unnamed storms that produce huge waves. I was shocked to see Malakas ranked #7. This was a West Pacific Typhoon that occurred during the ONR ITOP experiment. We didn’t get direct impact at our moorings, but of course we measured a strong swell signature (moorings were about 500 km apart). The dates and latitude indicate the phenomenal sea state occurred shortly after it transitioned to an extratropical. Could be fun to look further into this.
I’ll try to dig around and see if I recognize any of the other storms. John Lodise produced an extratropical cyclone tracks database using ERA5, this could be helpful for cross-matching the storm (but not with names). So far as I know, there isn’t a strong universally adopted convention or tradition of naming extratropical cyclones like there is in the tropical cyclone community. The UK, Ireland, Netherlands name storms in the North Atlantic. I couldn’t find anything on naming storms in the Southern Ocean, this might be wide open. I’m looking forward to following along.
Hi Tripp, I’ll be publishing the dataset (as needed for a paper) in a couple of weeks. I’m now automating the detection of “big waves” in satellite altimeter tracks. Yes, looking at storm tracks (e.g. Lodise et al. ) may be a good thing to interpret some of these. Also, there are some “storm doublets” that occur here and there (suc as storms Peter and Martin) , and maybe the pre-existing high waves from a past storm helps in buulding up the big waves for another … but I have some doubts. I’ve just completed the exact same retracking from ERA5 output, the values are much lower. I’ll post here the Hs vs Tp scatter plots from both.
Also the biggest storm of the past 10 years is the one I called “Eddie” because of the surfing competetion in Oahu. I think we could do a very interesting comprehensive analysis of strom + swells given all the data that is now avaible (10+ altimeters, SWIM, SWOT … )
I’ve chatted with half a dozen people on naming conventions for storms. Some fisrt thoughts are here: I had a storm - Google Drive
(see README) . I’ll probably have a zoom meeting about this in June. Just send a message if you want to be included.
