Plots of various measures of translation velocities of synthetic and historical tracks. A message box is first displayed listing key domain-wide statistics of the comparison between synthetic track and best track translation velocities: Bias of the zonal and meridional components (mean of the synthetic minus the historical track velocity components) and root-mean-square (RMS) of the magnitude of the vector difference between the synthetic and historical translation vectors.
Then a menu appears with various plot options. The first displays the vectors of the mean translation velocity, averaged over lat-long boxes with resolution specified by the parameter mres in the params.m file. The second is the same but for historical storms over the period bestyears in the params.m file. The third displays both, and the fourth displays the average vector of the synthetic minus the historical tracks.
The historical translation velocities are only calculated over grid boxes in which the number of historical tracks exceeds the parameter mintracks in the params.m file. This is also true of the difference vectors.
The scale of the arrows is indicated in a text box on each figure, except the figure showing both historical and synthetic translation vectors. The scale is simply the maximum magnitude of the translation vector (or vector difference) in the domain.
The statistics can be calculated over a sub-domain specified in the params.m file; likewise, the statistics can be calculated only for storms whose maximum surface winds in each lat-long box exceed a threshold as specified in params.m .
Various map properties can also be set in params.m.