An Observational Study of Typhoon Imbudo in 2003

Typhoon Imbudo was a super-typhoon over the northwestern Pacific in 2003. It caused tremendous damage when it made landfalls in the Philippines and China. This paper documents observational analyses of Typhoon Imbudo during its landfall in China. All available observations are used to study its motion, intensity changes, convection, structure and precipitation. Best-track data indicate that Imbudo moved west-northwestward until 1800 UTC 23 July and then turned northwestward. FNL (final) analysis data show that the motion of Imbudo is dominated by changes of the subtropical high. At Imbudo's mature stage, the minimum sea level pressure dropped to 910 hPa and the maximum sustained winds were as high as 67 m s 1, which is the intensity of a super-typhoon. The surface wind field exhibited asymmetric characteristics. Polar-orbiting satellite imagery also manifested convective asymmetry before Imbudo made landfall in China. Analyzed the vertical wind shear, it is shown that the convection has a downshear-left pattern. All kinds of precipitation data were used to identify the asymmetric characteristic of the rainfall associated with the Imbudo. The maximum rainfalls were located in the southern boundary area between Guangxi and Guangdong. However, the lack of in situ observations limited further analyses of this typhoon.

Estimation of tropical cyclone parameters and wind fields from SAR images

The traditional method of Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR)wind field retrieval is based on an empirical relation between the near surface winds and the normalized radar backscatter cross section to estimate wind speeds,where this relation is called the geophysical model function(GMF).However,the accuracy rapidly decreases due to the impact of rainfall on the measurement of SAR and the saturation of backscattered intensity under the condition of tropical cyclone.Because of no available instrument synchronously monitoring rain rate on the satellite platform of SAR,we have to derive the precipitation of the SAR observation time from non-simultaneous passive microwave observations of rain in combination with geostationary IR images,and then use the model of rain correction to remove the impact of rain on SAR wind field measurements.For the saturation of radar backscatter cross section in high wind speed conditions,we develop an approach to estimate tropical cyclone parameters and wind fields based on the improved Holland model and the SAR image features of tropical cyclone.To retrieve the low-to-moderate wind speed,the wind direction of tropical cyclone is estimated from the SAR image using wavelet analysis.And then the maximum wind speed and the central pressure of tropical cyclone are calculated by a least square minimization of the difference between the improved Holland model and the low-to-moderate wind speed retrieved from SAR.In addition,wind fields are estimated from the improved Holland model using the above-mentioned parameters of tropical cyclone as input.To evaluate the accuracy of our approach,the SAR images of typhoon Aere,typhoon Khanun,and hurricane Ophelia are used to estimate tropical cyclone parameters and wind fields,which are compared with the best track data and reanalyzed wind fields of the Joint Typhoon Warning Center(JTWC)and the Hurricane Research Division(HRD).The results indicate that the tropical cyclone center,maximum wind speed,and central pressure are generally consistent with the best track data,and wind fields agree well with reanalyzed data from HRD.