Work

pyTCR: A tropical cyclone rainfall model for python

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: pyTCR is a climatology software package developed in the Python programming language.It integrates the capabilities of several legacy physical models (Emanuel et al., 2008;Langousis & Veneziano, 2009) into a reduced-complexity framework, enabling rapid estimation of tropical cyclone (TC) rainfall consistent with the large-scale environment.Specifically, pyTCR implements a horizontally distributed and vertically integrated model (Zhu et al., 2013) for simulating rainfall driven by TCs.Along storm tracks, rainfall is estimated by computing the cross-boundary-layer, upward water vapor transport caused by different mechanisms including frictional convergence, vortex stretching, large-scale baroclinic effect (i.e., wind shear), topographic forcing, and radiative cooling (Lu et al., 2018).The package provides essential functionalities for modeling and interpreting spatio-temporal TC rainfall data.pyTCR requires a limited number of model input parameters, making it a convenient and useful tool for analyzing rainfall mechanisms driven by TCs.

Source: The Journal of Open Source Software

DOI: 10.21105/joss.08074

Authors: Phong V. V. Le, Geeta Persad, Gabriel Perez, Ifeanyichukwu C. Nduka, William Mobley, Ethan T. Coon

Institutions: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, The University of Texas at Austin, Oklahoma State University, Texas Advanced Computing Center

Language: English

Topic: Tropical and Extratropical Cyclones Research

Subfield: Atmospheric Science

Field: Earth and Planetary Sciences

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Climate action

Open Access status: diamond

Funders: U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research