The impact of vertical wind shear on the hurricane eye tilt at the sea and cloud levels

Author

Xuezhu Lv ; Xiaofeng Li ; Xiaofeng Yang ; Pichel, William G. ; Xuan Zhou ; Yuguang Liu

Author_Institution

Key Lab. of Phys. Oceanogr., Ocean Univ. of China, Qingdao, China

fYear

2013

fDate

21-26 July 2013

Firstpage

566

Lastpage

569

Abstract

Tropical cyclones generate powerful wind, torrential rainfall, high waves and damaging storm surge that affect coastal communities. Tracking and predicting cyclones is one of the most important tasks for meteorologists. In this study, we compare the hurricane/typhoon eye locations at the sea level observed by spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and its counterpart at the cloud level by the simultaneous infrared imagery. The vertical eye tilt at these two heights is compared with 850-200hPa vertical wind shear from SHIPS data. Five case studies show that the displacements vary from 10 to 22 km, with tilt direction oriented from downshear-left to downshear to downshear-right. These results are consistent with former studies.

Keywords

clouds; infrared imaging; ocean waves; rain; remote sensing by radar; sea level; spaceborne radar; storms; synthetic aperture radar; weather forecasting; wind; SHIPS data; cloud level; coastal communities; cyclone prediction; cyclone tracking; damaging storm surge; downshear-left direction; downshear-right direction; high waves; hurricane eye tilt; hurricane-typhoon eye locations; oriented tilt direction; powerful wind generation; sea level; simultaneous infrared imagery; spaceborne SAR; spaceborne synthetic aperture radar; torrential rainfall; tropical cyclones; vertical eye tilt; vertical wind shear impact; Clouds; Hurricanes; Remote sensing; Satellites; Sea surface; Synthetic aperture radar; Typhoons; MERIS; SAR; eye tilt; hurricane; typhoon; vertical wind shear;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2013 IEEE International

Conference_Location

Melbourne, VIC

ISSN

2153-6996

Print_ISBN

978-1-4799-1114-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IGARSS.2013.6721219

Filename

6721219