USE OF A NEW STEERING FLOW METHOD TO PREDICT TROPICAL CYCLONE MOTION

A tropical cyclone is a kind of violent weather system that takes place in warmer tropical oceans and spins rapidly around its center and at the same time moves along surrounding flows. It is generally recognized that the large-scale circulation plays a major role in determining the movement of tropical cyclones and the effects of steering flows are the highest priority in the forecasting of tropical cyclone motion and track. This article adopts a new method to derive the steering flow and select a typical swerving track case (typhoon Dan, coded 9914) to illustrate the validity of the method. The general approach is to modify the vorticity, geostropical vorticity and divergence, investigate the change in the non-divergent stream function, geoptential and velocity potential, respectively, and compute a modified velocity field to determine the steering flow. Unlike other methods in regular use such as weighted average of wind fields or geopoential height, this method has the least adverse effects on the environmental field and could derive a proper steering flow which fits well with storm motion. Combined with other internal and external forcings, this method could have wide application in the prediction of tropical cyclone track.