• Atmosphere
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.209-220
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• 2011

A new consensus algorithm for the prediction of tropical cyclone track has been developed. Conventional consensus is a simple average of a few fixed models that showed the good performance in track prediction for the past few years. Meanwhile, the consensus in this study is a weighted average of a few models that may change for every individual forecast time. The models are selected as follows. The first step is to find the analogous past tropical cyclone tracks to the current track. The next step is to evaluate the model performances for those past tracks. Finally, we take the weighted average of the selected models. More weight is given to the higher performance model. This new algorithm has been named as DYTRAP (DYnamic data-base Typhoon tRAck Prediction) in the sense that the data base is used to find the analogous past tracks and the effective models for every individual track prediction case. DYTRAP has been applied to all 2009 tropical cyclone track prediction. The results outperforms those of all models as well as all the official forecasts of the typhoon centers. In order to prove the real usefulness of DYTRAP, it is necessary to apply the DYTRAP system to the real time prediction because the forecast in typhoon centers usually uses 6-hour or 12-hour-old model guidances.