thuner 0.0.16

Multifeature tracking and analysis of meteorological events

Package description

Welcome to the Thunderstorm Event Reconnaissance (THUNER) package! THUNER is a flexible toolkit for multi-feature detection, tracking, tagging and analysis of events in meteorological datasets; documentation is available online. THUNER’s intended application is the tracking and analysis convective weather events. If you use THUNER in your work, consider citing

• Leese et al. (1971)

• Dixon and Wiener (1993)

• Whitehall et al. (2015)

• Fridlind et al (2019)

• Raut et al (2021)

• Short et al. (2023)

Note many excellent alternatives to THUNER exist, including PyFLEXTRKR, GTG, TAMS, tobac and MOAAP. When designing a tracking based research project involving THUNER, consider performing sensitivity tests using these alternatives.

Installation

The THUNER repository can be cloned from GitHub in the usual ways. Cloning the repository is the easiest way to access the demo, workflow and gallery folders. After cloning, a new conda environment using environment.yml, then run pip install . from the THUNER root directory.

Alternatively, THUNER can be installed using conda, ideally into a new environment:

conda install -c conda-forge thuner

While conda installation is preferred, pip may also be used. First install the esmpy package manually as detailed here. THUNER can then be installed using

pip install thuner

Note that THUNER depends on xesmf for regridding, and is therefore currently only available on Linux and OSX systems.

Examples

GridRad

The examples below illustrate the tracking of convective systems in GridRad Severe radar data. Object merge events are visualized through the “mixing” of the colours associated with each merging object. Objects that split off from existing objects retain the colour of their parent object. Objects which intersect the domain boundary have their stratiform-offsets and velocities masked, as these cannot be measured accurately when the object is partially outside the domain.

The example below depicts multiple trailing-stratiform type systems.

The example below depicts multiple leading-stratiform type systems.

Etymology

According to Wikipedia, between the 8th and 16th centuries the storm god more commonly known as Thor was called “Thuner” by the inhabitants of what is now west Germany.

Acknowledgements

THUNER’s documentation is hosted on Read the Docs. THUNER was developed by Ewan Short while supported by Australian Research Council grants CE170100023. and DP200102516. Computational resources during development were provided by the Australian National Computational Infrastructure (NCI).