Environment catalogues of satellite-tracked tropical mesoscale convective systems from reanalysis

A 20-year dataset of MCS-environment catalogues is provided through the integration of advanced ERA5 reanalysis, satellite observations, and tropical mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) identified using the Python FLEXible object TRacKeR (PyFLEXTRKR). The catalogues contain key thermodynamic variables, surface pressure, precipitation, and brightness temperature sampled throughout the lifecycle of each identified MCS. A low-tropospheric buoyancy metric—representing a critical driver of moist convection—is also derived from ERA5 and included. All outputs are stored in NetCDF format. To support user customization, a Python-based software package is provided, enabling users to include additional variables of interest or generate catalogues based on alternative MCS tracks. , Tropical MCS tracks spanning 20 years (2001–2020) are obtained from the existing PyFLEXTRKR dataset (Feng et al., 2021,2023), where MCSs are identified and tracked using high-resolution satellite imagery and precipitation estimates from GPM-IMERG (Huffman et al., 2015). These tracks provide detailed spatial and temporal information—including the location, timing, and lifecycle evolution of cloud and precipitation features—which serves as the basis for extracting concurrent environmental and convective properties from coordinated data sources. A 10° × 10° box is used to extract the environmental variables, providing a domain generally large enough to capture both the MCS and its surrounding environment. This box is centered on the ERA5 grid point closest to the tracked MCS centroid at each time step. As a result, ERA5 variables are preserved on their native grid, while other variables, such as precipitation and brightness temperature, are interpolated to match the ERA5 grid at 0.25° reso..., # Environment catalogues of satellite-tracked tropical mesoscale convective systems from reanalysis Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.98sf7m0w2](10.5061/dryad.98sf7m0w2) ## Description of the data and file structure A 20-year dataset of MCS-environment catalogues is provided through the integration of advanced ERA5 reanalysis, satellite observations, and tropical mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) identified using the Python FLEXible object TRacKeR (PyFLEXTRKR). The catalogues contain key thermodynamic variables, surface pressure, precipitation, and brightness temperature sampled throughout the lifecycle of each identified MCS (6 life stages: Identification, Initial, Growing, Mature, Decaying, Termination). A low-tropospheric buoyancy metric—representing a critical driver of moist convection—is also derived from ERA5 and included. All outputs are stored in NetCDF format. To support user customization, a Python-based software package is provided, enabling users to include additional varia..., ,