tropycal.recon.vdms

class tropycal.recon.vdms(storm, data=None, update=False)[source]

Creates an instance of a VDMs object containing all Vortex Data Message (VDM) data for a single storm.

Parameters

  • storm (tropycal.tracks.Storm) – Requested storm.

  • data (str, optional) – Filepath of pickle file containing VDM data retrieved from vdms.to_pickle(). If provided, data will be retrieved from the local pickle file instead of the NHC server.

  • update (bool) – True = search for new data, following existing data in the dropsonde object, and concatenate.

Returns

Dataset – An instance of VDMs.

Notes

Warning

Recon data is currently only available from 1989 onwards.

VDM data is currently retrieved from the National Hurricane Center from 2006 onwards, and UCAR from 1989 through 2005.

There are two recommended ways of retrieving a vdms object. Since the ReconDataset, hdobs, dropsondes and vdms classes are storm-centric, a Storm object is required for both methods.

#Retrieve Hurricane Michael (2018) from TrackDataset
basin = tracks.TrackDataset()
storm = basin.get_storm(('michael',2018))

The first method is to use the empty instance of ReconDataset already initialized in the Storm object, which has a get_vdms() method thus allowing all of the vdms attributes and methods to be accessed from the Storm object. As a result, a Storm object does not need to be provided as an argument.

#Retrieve all VDMs for this storm
storm.recon.get_vdms()

#Retrieve the raw VDM data
storm.recon.vdms.data

#Use the plot_points() method of hdobs
storm.recon.vdms.plot_points()

The second method is to use the vdms class independently of the other recon classes:

from tropycal.recon import vdms

#Retrieve all VDMs for this storm, passing the Storm object as an argument
vdms_obj = vdms(storm)

#Retrieve the raw VDM data
vdms_obj.data

#Use the plot_points() method of vdms
vdms_obj.plot_points()

Methods Summary

vdms.isel(index)

Select a single VDM by index of the list.

vdms.plot_points([varname, domain, ax, ...])

Creates a plot of recon data points.

vdms.plot_time_series([time, best_track, dots])

Creates a time series of MSLP VDM data.

vdms.sel([mission, time, domain])

Select a subset of VDMs by any of its parameters and return a new vdms object.

vdms.to_pickle(filename)

Save VDM data (list of dictionaries) to a pickle file

vdms.update()

Update with the latest data for an ongoing storm.