Limited Sea Surface Temperature Cooling Due to the Barrier Layer Promoting Super Typhoon Mangkhut(2018)

This study investigates the impact of the salinity barrier layer(BL)on the upper ocean response to Super Typhoon Mangkhut(2018)in the western North Pacific.After the passage of Mangkhut,a noticeable increase(~0.6 psu)in sea surface salinity and a weak decrease(<1℃)in sea surface temperature(SST)were observed on the right side of the typhoon track.Mangkhut-induced SST change can be divided into the three stages,corresponding to the variations in BL thickness and SST before,during,and after the passage of Mangkhut.During the pre-typhoon stage,SST slightly warmed due to the entrainment of BL warm water,which suppressed the cooling induced by surface heat fluxes and horizontal advection.During the forced stage,SST cooling was controlled by entrainment,and the preexisting BL reduced the total cooling by 0.89℃ d-1,thus significantly weakening the overall SST cooling induced by Mangkhut.During the relaxation stage,the SST cooling was primarily caused by the entrainment.Our results indicate that a preexisting BL can limit typhoon-induced SST cooling by suppressing the entrainment of cold thermocline water,which contributed to Mangkhut becoming the strongest typhoon in 2018.

Improved Simulation of Summer Heavy Rainfall over Beijing and Henan by the YHGSM with Updated Subgrid Orographic Parameters

In numerical weather prediction(NWP),the parameterization of orographic drag plays an important role in representing subgrid orographic effects.The subgrid orographic parameters are the key input to the parameterization of orographic drag.Currently,the subgrid orographic parameters in most NWP models were produced based on elevation datasets generated many years ago,with a coarse resolution and low quality.In this paper,using the latest high-quality elevation data and considering the applicable scale range of the subgrid orographic parameters,we construct the orographic parameters,including the subgrid orographic standard deviation,anisotropy,orientation,and slope,that are required as input to the orographic gravity wave drag(OGWD)parameterization.Finally,we introduce the newly constructed orographic parameters into the Yin-He Global Spectral Model(YHGSM),optimize the description of the orographic effect in the model,and improve the simulation of two typical heavy rainfall events in Beijing and Henan.

Hurricane eye morphology extraction from SAR images by texture analysis

Tropical hurricanes are among the most devastating hazards on Earth.Knowledge about its intense inner-core structure and dynamics will improve hurricane forecasts and advisories.The precise morphological parameters extracted from high-resolution spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR)images,can play an essential role in further exploring and monitoring hurricane dynamics,especially when hurricanes undergo amplification,shearing,eyewall replacements and so forth.Moreover,these parameters can help to build guidelines for wind calibration of the more abundant,but lower resolution scatterometer wind data,thus better linking scatterometer wind fields to hurricane categories.In this paper,we develop a new method for automatically extracting the hurricane eyes from C-band SAR data by constructing Gray Level-Gradient Co-occurrence Matrices(GLGCMs).The hurricane eyewall is determined with a two-dimensional vector,generated by maximizing the class entropy of the hurricane eye region in GLGCM.The results indicate that when the hurricane is weak,or the eyewall is not closed,the hurricane eye extracted with this automatic method still agrees with what is observed visually,and it preserves the texture characteristics of the original image.As compared to Du’s wavelet analysis method and other morphological analysis methods,the approach developed here has reduced artefacts due to factors like hurricane size and has lower programming complexity.In summary,the proposed method provides a new and elegant choice for hurricane eye morphology extraction.