PredICTropiC (Predicting Impacts Caused by Tropical Cyclones) is a website developped as part of the EURISTIC project in 2021. It aims at monitoring and forecasting impacts on forest vegetation due to Tropical Cyclones (TCs) over the South West Pacific (SWP) basin.
The chosen approach sticks to what follows :
- Forest cover is based on the following landcover map produced by the European Spatial Agency
- A Willoughby cyclone model combined with inputs from the IBTrACS database was used to reconstruct the 2D surface wind speedstructures generated by each TC.
- Impacts on forest vegetation are expressed in terms of relative changes in NDVI following a storm. Computations are based on MOD13Q1 NDVI products. The so-called historical panel allows the user to visualize all TCs that have reached category 1 or higher in the SWP basin over the 2000-2020 period and potentially observe their impacts if available.
- A segmented-linear model has been derived from the analysis of NDVI products that followed every TC landfalls over the 2000-2020 period on the SWP basin. The input to this model is a TC modelled using both its track and its reconstructions of 2D surface wind speed structures. It therefore predicts the relative changes in NDVI generated by the given TC. This feature is available within the so-called Forecast panel.
EURISTIC led to the publication of an article that will be soon available in the forthcoming months.