Tropical Cyclone Motion (TCM-90) Research Initiative Observations

The Tropical Cyclone Motion (TCM-90) Research Initiative, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), was a project dedicated to understanding tropical cyclone motion and improving forecast accuracy. The TCM-90 was conducted with several international tropical cyclone field programs from Australia, former Soviet Union, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, and Thailand. The experiment combined aircraft, ship, and satellite data. The datasets contain standard atmospheric observations plus special sets of data collected especially for the field experiments. The observations include radar wind profiler measurements, dropwindsondes from a NASA DC-8 research aircraft, reprocessed cloud-tracked winds, drifting buoy measurements throughout the Philippine Sea, and special ship observations taken by research vessels from the former Soviet Union.