A sampling of TC PRIMED products from Typhoon Maria at 1013 UTC on 9 July 2018.
A sampling of TC PRIMED products from Typhoon Maria at 1013 UTC on 9 July 2018 in the western North Pacific, where a) is GPROF, b) is GPM DPR precipitation rate, c) GPM DPR reflectivity, d) 36.6 GHz, e) 89 GHz, and f) infrared from Himawari-8.

Welcome to the home of TC PRIMED!

Why TC PRIMED?

Tropical cyclone forecasters rely heavily on a multitude of forecast products from various sources to gain insight into the state of the tropical cyclone and issue forecast guidance.

These forecast products include, but are not limited to

  • Observations from low-Earth-orbiting satellites, with passive microwave sensors that can peer through clouds to provide forecasters with a glimpse at the convective and precipitation structure of tropical cyclones
  • Environmental diagnostics from models like the NOAA Statistical Hurricane Intensity Prediction Scheme (SHIPS) that inform forecasters on the various states of the environment within which the tropical cyclone is embedded

While these products are invaluable for short-term forecasting applications, climate researchers would also benefit from having a consistent, long-term collection of the products to conduct multidecadal studies of tropical cyclones. However, the widely disparate data sources of these products hinder the development of new tropical cyclone forecast products and new tropical cyclone research.

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What is TC PRIMED?

The NOAA/CSU Tropical Cyclone PRecipitation, Infrared, Microwave, and Environmental Dataset (TC PRIMED) aims to ameliorate the issue of disparate data sources by consolidating forecast products from various data sources into an analysis- and artificial intelligence (AI)-ready format. TC PRIMED centers data around satellite passive microwave observations of tropical cyclones.

For more details on whether TC PRIMED is ready for your AI application, see the AI readiness portion of the Products page.

TC PRIMED v01r01 Statistics

  • Contains 1.6 TB of data and growing
  • Spans from to
  • Captures 3,552 global tropical cyclones
  • Includes 242,613 satellite overpasses

What are the data products?

  • Global tropical cyclone characteristics from
  • Multi-agency inter-calibrated, multi-channel microwave brightness temperatures
  • Retrieved precipitation from the NASA Goddard Profiling Algorithm (GPROF)
  • Infrared brightness temperatures from the global constellation of geostationary satellites
  • ECMWF fifth-generation reanalysis (ERA5) product fields and derived environmental diagnostics
  • TRMM/GPM precipitation radar variables

For more information on the TC PRIMED products, see the products page.

If you have specific questions, contact the TC PRIMED development team via .

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TC PRIMED Support and Funding

TC PRIMED fosters new research to better understand tropical cyclones and new forecast product development, facilitates increased use of satellite and diagnostics data, and promotes collaboration between

TC PRIMED has received funding from

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