RABTracks: Reanalysis-Augmented Best Tracks for Tropical Cyclones

Abstract. A new dataset, Reanalysis-Augmented Best Tracks for Tropical Cyclones (RABTracks), is created for the study of Tropical Cyclones (TCs) globally. The goal of RABTracks is to bring together multiple sources of information on historical tropical cyclones in one place. To do so, we augment the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) with track data from five analyses (four reanalyses and one operational analysis), using two different tracking methods, in all basins, from 1940 to present. This provides us, in particular, with extended tracks that reconstruct the early and late stages of each recorded cyclone. It is also an opportunity to gather information on cyclones’ intensity, size, and to retrieve information about the cyclones’ nature at different stages, derived from the Cyclone Phase Space (Hart, 2003), and SyCLoPS classification (Han and Ullrich, 2025). This dataset has a high potential to support robust TC-related climatological studies. It was also designed to be easy to extend with additional data, and all the code for creating the dataset, making the analyses and adding new data is provided in an open-source repository.