Introduction
A tropical cyclone is a rapidly rotating storm system characterized by a low-pressure center, strong winds, and a spiral arrangement of thunderstorms that produce heavy rain. Depending on its location and strength, a tropical cyclone is referred to by names such as hurricane typhoon or tropical cyclone. Within Delft3D-FLOW time-series for space varying wind velocity components (east-west and south-north) and atmospheric pressure on a Spiderweb grid can be used to simulate the impact of such an event. For more information about these possibilities one is referred to the Delft3D-FLOW manual.
Usage of the toolbox
The Tropical Cyclone toolbox makes it possible to computes wind field and pressure drop generated by a cyclone. All it takes are basically three steps
- Determine the track of the cyclone
- 'Draw track' is used to draw a cyclone track with the mouse
- First select the time (start and time step)
- Secondly determine other settings like Rmax or Pdrop. Which settings can selected depends on the 'Method selected in the Toolbox. Default is the Vmax, Pd and Rmax approach
- 'Load track' is used to load an previous saved track which was defined in Dashboard
- It is also possible to load tracks of cyclones (*.cyc) from available databases using 'Import Track' from sources of the JTWC, NHC or UNISYS.
- 'Draw track' is used to draw a cyclone track with the mouse
- Define a number of settings related to the spiderweb under 'Spiderweb Parameters', such as the directional bins and radial bins that are used to define aspects of the spiderweb.
- Click on 'Compute cyclone' to generate a spider web file (*. spw) containing wind field and pressure drop which can be imported in Delft3D-FLOW.
Figure: Example of the track of a tropical cyclone generated by Delft Dashboard for the coast of Bangladesh.