Tropical cyclones are weather events that can happen in almost all sections of our Ocean. Usually divided by basins, we tend to pay more attention to them based on where we live and what time of the year it is. For example, in the US we call it the Hurricane season, covers the North Atlantic and Eastern Pacific basins, and runs from June 1st to November 30. However there are other 5 basins where tropical cyclones can develop and progress to hurricane strength. These basins are:
Western Pacific
North Indian Ocean
South-West Indian Ocean
Australian region
Southern Pacific
In this dataset we visualize all tropical storms that caused loss of life or property during 2024 and we use data for the sea surface temperature as the background. Hurricanes require warm waters to develop and grow, thus ocean temperature is a crucial variable that provides context to the weather event. This visualization will also allow us to explore the intersection between these very powerful weather events and humans. We should also remember that the dynamics of tropical cyclones not only affect us, we are also affecting the weather event by changing critical variables in our planet such as temperature.
Frames for sea surface temperature and clouds were processed and provided by Rick Kohrs from University of Wisconsin Madison. They were animated using the open source video editing software ShotCut. Hurricane data was obtained from the IBTrACS Version 4r01 database and then cleaned for the specific basin. This data was used in a Python script to create the tracks, hurricane labels, and animations for each storm at the same timestamps as the satellite images. Finally all these sections were again combined using Shotcut for the final video.
Science On a Sphere
