Why Cyclone Center is the CrockPot of citizen science projects

Much like North Carolina-style barbecue , our project is slow-roasted and prepared for greatness.

Cyclone Center Paper published

A paper on Cyclone Center has been published in the American Meteorological Society’s Monthly Weather Review Journal. It will appear in print in the October issue and is also available online. This blog post is

Cyclone Center News and Updates

Hello Classifiers and Friends!  There have been a number of recent developments in Cyclone Center world in recent weeks.  Have a read and then head over to the Cyclone Center website and help us keep the classifying momentum!

New Cyclone Center Journal Article Accepted

CC scientist Dr. Ken Knapp from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) in Asheville, NC is the lead author on a new paper just recently accepted into the journal Monthly Weather Review.  Titled “Identification of tropical cyclone ‘storm types’

Most Uncertain Storm Images

One of the great things about crowd sourcing is that we have the luxury of using numerous classifications to determine an answer for one image.  The responses of 15 citizen scientists is much more powerful than a response from one person, even if that person is an expert.

We have gone through every single storm image on Cyclone Center that has been classified by at least 10 citizen scientists.  All classifications were used to determine the variance of the image – or, how similar one classification was to the others.  Ambiguous cloud patterns will have a higher variance than one with a clear eye, for example.

Cyclone Center Citizen Scientists Contribute To Article In Top Meteorology Journal

Our first major publication appeared online the week of September 8 (link at the end of the post) in the #1 journal for meteorology papers, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.  We have been working with nearly 300,000 classifications from over 5,000 of our valuable citizen scientists over the past year (we now have over 365,000 classifications from 7,400 registered users).  Our primary goal was to assess how well Cyclone Center is working and whether it can lead to even more valuable results down the road.  The answer is

Early results for Charley and Frances

What a week we had! We had envisioned many classifications, but received so many more! So far we have received more than 11,000 classifications from nearly 2000 users in June. These storms had never been analyzed on CycloneCenter and Hurricane Charley was completed on the first day! Hurricane Frances is nearly complete now. We will likely have more completely new storms this month.

Learning algorithms

There are numerous crowdsourced science projects out there and each have the same goal:

Eyes on Cyclone Center

With 15,000+ citizen scientists contributing to CycloneCenter.org, we have more than thirty thousand eyes searching through satellite data.

So far, everyone has provided input on almost 50,000 images. As we begin to sift through all the responses, one task is to determine the storm type (eye, shear, embedded center or curved band) of each image from all the responses.

The eye images seem to make up about 8% of our images so far. The image below is a collection of some of the images identified as eye scenes by the citizen scientists. This is only a small portion of what we have, but it shows great progress.

Images identified as Eye scenes by citizen scientists.

This contains only 391 of the ~4500 eye images identified. So, 30,000 human eyes have found 4500 storm eyes.

Super-preliminary-barely-ready-for-the-public results look promising!

Well, after getting 100,000+ classifications, we thought it was time to let you – the citizen scientists – know that you’re doing a great job!

Q: What did you find?
A: During our preliminary analysis, we have observed some results that encouraged us – the science team – so we thought it would encourage you – the citizen scientists.