QSCAT-R: The QuikSCAT Tropical Cyclone Radial Structure Dataset

This document describes the QuikSCAT Tropical Cyclone Radial Structure Dataset (QSCAT-R), including its parameter and file structure as well as the underlying methodology for its construction. QSCAT-R contains data for the radial structure of near-surface wind and rain rate for tropical cyclones globally during the period 1999-2009. The dataset is derived from the corresponding two-dimensional data fields originally estimated from QuikSCAT satellite measurements and optimized for analysis of tropical cyclones within the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) QuikSCAT Tropical Cyclone database. QSCAT-R includes radial profiles of total wind speed and its azimuthal and radial components and corresponding estimates of canonical wind radii, as well as radial profiles of a quantity proportional to rain rate and, when available, collocated SSM/I cloud liquid data. Additionally, data coverage necessarily varies in space and time due to the nature of satellite remote sensing, and thus QSCAT-R provides a parametric measure of data asymmetry to help quantify this form of uncertainty. Overall, as a relatively small dataset (~100 MB) written in a user-friendly NetCDF format, QSCAT-R offers the research community a significant new tool for the analysis of the radial structure of tropical cyclones in nature.