Announcement: Project SWAP Journal Article and 3rd Data Release (SWAP DR3)

We are thrilled to announce two significant milestones for Project SWAP (Severe Weather Archive of the Philippines):

Manuscript/Preprint Published in Annals of Geophysics (AG):Our manuscript on Project SWAP's methodology, progress, and insights i.e. spatio-temporal patterns into severe weather phenomena in the Philippines has been officially published in the Annals of Geophysics. This is the first published research that tackles the climatology of severe weather events across the Philippines. This publication highlights the innovative efforts of SWAP in documenting tornadoes, hailstorms, and waterspouts, providing a foundation for better understanding for severe weather events. Kindly check the additional description and/or the attached journal article in this announcement. 

Towards the 3rd Data Release for Project SWAP:As also mentioned in the journal article, I am glad to announce the 3rd Data Release of Project SWAP (hereafter, SWAP DR3) which reached a groundbreaking milestone, now featuring more than 1,000 severe weather events across the country.

For SWAP DR3, potential features will include: 

Improvements to the Geographic decimal coordinates (i.e. latitude-longitude pairs) for accuracy purposes,

As indicated above, the number of severe weather events have doubled to more than 1000 cases/events/reports. Due to this, the number of potential sources has been revised from a maximum of 3 sources to 5 sources for the next release, 

The idea of technical reports was unfortunately scrapped, but was replaced instead in form of preprints/manuscript/journal articles, 

Improvements to the documentation, particularly to the metadata in PDF, will have additional indicators for accuracy and reliability purposes, and

SWAP DR3 will continue to feature more proximity rawinsonde observations (RAOBs or proximity sounding profiles) as queried and analyzed through SounderPy of Gillett (2024). This is added on a zip file for this archive.

At the moment, we are also conducting an additional research with regards to the hail climatology of the Philippines (Manalo et al. in preparation), and additional case studies; (a) 13 August 2021 Hailstorm in the Province of Bulacan and (b) 27 May 2024 Tornadic Supercell in the Province of Pampanga. 

As indicated, this project can be important to uncovering the Philippine's convective and kinematic environment on various timescales, essentially creating a climatological baseline to further understand both mesoscale processes and long term climate linkages. However, any analyses using this archive will require careful consideration of biases therein, many of which we have discussed in the journal article (which was previously, a preprint) attached in this announcement.

I apologize since I cannot do the incremental patch/update lately due to a lower respiratory illness slowing down my body. However, rest assured that I am recovering to this and I'll be able to deal with the addition of other cases' sounding profile.

Kindly see the attached table I created in this announcement for the versions of Project SWAP and other details. For now, SWAP DR2 will be good to use and is imported/carried to this announcement. If you have comments, kindly use the (Updated) SWAP Contact Form below. 

Indexing number of Versions

Description

w/ Zenodo DOI?

Is it citable? 

Version 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and so on...

Major Data Release/Major Update

Yes

Yes*

Version 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and so on...

Incremental Update/Patch

Yes

Yes*

Version x.x.1, x.x.2, x.x.3, and so on...

Announcement

Yes

No

*Note: You can just cite all the versions for your ease. See the Additional Description.