A relocation procedure to initialize tropical cyclones was developed to improve the representation of the initial conditions and the track forecast for Panasonic Weather Solutions Tropical Operational Forecasts. This ...A relocation procedure to initialize tropical cyclones was developed to improve the representation of the initial conditions and the track forecast for Panasonic Weather Solutions Tropical Operational Forecasts. This scheme separates the vortex perturbation and environment field from the first guess, then relocates the initial vortex perturbations to Lhe observed position by merging them with the environment field. The relationships of wind vector components with stream function and velocity potential are used for separating the vortex disturbance from first guess. For the separation of scalars, a low-pass Barnes filter is employed. The irregular-shaped relocation area corresponding to the specific initial conditions is determined by mapping the edge of the vortex radius in 36 directions.Then, the non-vortex perturbations in the relocation area are removed by a two-pass Barnes filter to retain the vortex perturbations, while the variable fields outside the perimeter of the modified vortex are kept ide.ntical to the original first guess. The potential impacts of this scheme on track forecasts were examined for three hurricane cases in the 2011-12 hurricane season. The experimental results demonstrate that the initialization scheme is able to effectively separate the vortex field from the environment field and maintain a relatively balanced and accurate relocated first guess. As the initial track error is reduced, the following track forecasts are considerably improved. The 72-h average track forecast error was redu,~ed by 32.6% for the cold-start cases, and by 38.4% when using the full-cycling data assimilation because of the accumulatedL improvements from the initialization scheme.展开更多
基金jointly supported by National Center for Atmospheric Research(NCAR)and Panasonic Avionics CorporationNational Natural Science Foundation of China(NSFC)under Grant No.40975068+1 种基金the National Basic Research Program of China(973 Program)under Grand No.2013CB430102Jiangsu province colleges and universities natural science major basic research projects
文摘A relocation procedure to initialize tropical cyclones was developed to improve the representation of the initial conditions and the track forecast for Panasonic Weather Solutions Tropical Operational Forecasts. This scheme separates the vortex perturbation and environment field from the first guess, then relocates the initial vortex perturbations to Lhe observed position by merging them with the environment field. The relationships of wind vector components with stream function and velocity potential are used for separating the vortex disturbance from first guess. For the separation of scalars, a low-pass Barnes filter is employed. The irregular-shaped relocation area corresponding to the specific initial conditions is determined by mapping the edge of the vortex radius in 36 directions.Then, the non-vortex perturbations in the relocation area are removed by a two-pass Barnes filter to retain the vortex perturbations, while the variable fields outside the perimeter of the modified vortex are kept ide.ntical to the original first guess. The potential impacts of this scheme on track forecasts were examined for three hurricane cases in the 2011-12 hurricane season. The experimental results demonstrate that the initialization scheme is able to effectively separate the vortex field from the environment field and maintain a relatively balanced and accurate relocated first guess. As the initial track error is reduced, the following track forecasts are considerably improved. The 72-h average track forecast error was redu,~ed by 32.6% for the cold-start cases, and by 38.4% when using the full-cycling data assimilation because of the accumulatedL improvements from the initialization scheme.
