Published June 5, 2026 | Version v2
Dataset Open

Climatology of serial cyclone clusters and solitary cyclones in the Arctic for 1979 to 2024

Authors/Creators

  • 1. Alfred-Wegener-Institut fur Polar und Meeresforschung Forschungsstelle Potsdam

Description

This dataset provides a climatology of serial cyclone cluster and solitary cyclone events for the Arctic region including information on cyclone (cluster) occurrences and properties (event duration, cyclone intensity, cyclone cluster size). The dataset is derived from 6-hourly sea level pressure fields from the ERA5 reanalysis (Hersbach et al., 2020) by applying the Multi-Object Analysis of Atmospheric Phenomena (MOAAP) tracking tool (Prein et al., 2023) version V1.1.1 (https://github.com/AndreasPrein/MOAAP) and additional post-processing routines to separate the detected cyclone events into serial clusters and solitary cyclones. The separation is based on a maximum allowed time gap of 48 hours between consecutive cyclone passages. The dataset is available on the Equal-Area Scalable Earth (EASE) grid version 2.0 (Brodzik et al., 2012) with 25km² horizontal resolution and covers the years 1979 to 2024 with a daily temporal resolution. Hereby, days with a cyclone occurrence for at least one, 6-hourly timestep are considered as cyclone days. An example jupyter notebook showcasing the programmatic use of the data will be made avilable at https://ac3-tr.github.io/ac3-book/example-notebooks/

sea-ice concentration (SIC) fields from the ERA5 reanalysis have been added to the dataset in version 2. 

Files

CycloneClusterSeaIce_Climatology_ERA5.zip

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Additional details

Funding

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
ArctiC Amplification: Climate Relevant Atmospheric and SurfaCe Processes, and Feedback Mechanisms (AC)3 268020496 TRR 172

References

  • Hersbach H, Bell B, Berrisford P, et al. (2020). The ERA5 global reanalysis. Q J R Meteorol Soc., 146, 1999–2049. https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.3803
  • Prein, A. F., Mooney, P. A., & Done, J. M. (2023). The multi-scale interactions of atmospheric phenomenon in mean and extreme precipitation. Earth's Future, 11, e2023EF003534. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023EF003534
  • Brodzik, M. J., Billingsley, B., Haran, T., Raup, B., & Savoie, M. H. (2012). EASE-Grid 2.0: Incremental but Significant Improvements for Earth-Gridded Data Sets. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 1(1), 32-45. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi1010032