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This is the Home page for the University of Melbourne Cyclone Statistics web access.

This version (1.0) supersedes the beta version that has been operating since May 2006. See the Help section for documentation. This mainly consists of Basic Help and an Example. The web site is designed to be fairly self-explanatory.

Firstly, choose a dataset from the Dataset Menu (top pane).

Then click on a link in the Menu (left-hand pane) to perform tasks.

Details about our group are available here:

Atmosphere & Ocean Sciences, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne

Please report any problems to Kevin Keay.

Please Note: Our network is backed up nightly from 18:00-24:00 (UTC +10:00) and so there may be poor response at times during this period. Furthermore, the temporary directories created for a user are deleted at 17:10 each Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.

Copyright and Disclaimer

We use the cyclone statistics that are presented here in our published research. Although every effort has been made to ensure that they are correct we can not guarantee that the statistics or the data used to compute them are free from errors. Hence we take no responsibility for any negative consequences arising from their use by any party external to our group at the University of Melbourne.

The cyclone statistics, as data files or images, may be freely used for research and most publications including journals. However in the case of a reference book (e.g. an encyclopaedia) or a text book you should contact Ian Simmonds for clarification on any potential copyright issue relating to the University of Melbourne.

In any event it would be appreciated that you include an appropriate reference to this web site. For instance:

The cyclone statistics were obtained from the University of Melbourne Automatic Cyclone Tracking web page (http://www.cycstats.org/tracks/cychome.htm). These are computed using the automatic cyclone tracking scheme of Murray and Simmonds (Murray and Simmonds 1991a; Murray and Simmonds 1991b; Simmonds et al. 1999; Simmonds and Murray 1999; Simmonds et al. 2003; Lim and Simmonds 2007).

Murray, R. J., and I. Simmonds, 1991a: A numerical scheme for tracking cyclone centres from digital data. Part I: Development and operation of the scheme. Australian Meteorological Magazine, 39, 155–166.

Murray, R. J., and I. Simmonds, 1991b: A numerical scheme for tracking cyclone centres from digital data. Part II: Application to January and July general circulation model simulations. Australian Meteorological Magazine, 39, 167–180.

Simmonds, I., R. J. Murray, and R. M. Leighton, 1999: A refinement cyclone tracking methods with data from FROST. Australian Meteorological Magazine (Special ed.), 35–49.

Simmonds, I., and R. J. Murray, 1999: Southern extratropical cyclone behavior in ECMWF analyses during the FROST Special Observing Periods. Weather and Forecasting, 14, 878-891.

Simmonds, I., K. Keay and E.-P. Lim, 2003: Synoptic activity in the seas around Antarctica. Monthly Weather Review, 131, 272-288.

Lim, E.-P., and I. Simmonds, 2007: Southern Hemisphere winter extratropical cyclone characteristics and vertical organization observed with the ERA-40 reanalysis data in 1979-2001. Journal of Climate, 20, 2675-2690.