Climatology of Cyclones and Their Tracking over Southern Coasts of Caspian Sea

The southern coasts of Caspian Sea is subjected to synoptic/mesoscale weather systems ranging from locally enhanced sea breeze formation and small local front systems to synoptic scale cyclones. This study presents climatology of cyclones over the southern coasts of Caspian Sea covering a ten year period 1996-2005. Altogether 57 cyclones were formed during the ten year period. Anoticeable seasonality is observed in evolution of cyclones over the entire Caspian region, a majority of the 57 cyclones (73.7%) were developed during winter and fall seasons while the remaining (26.3%) occurred during spring and summer seasons.Most of the cyclones were of low intensity, out of 57 cyclones observed during the ten year period 16 (28%) were deep depressions and 24 (42.1%) were cyclonic storms. Altogether 5 super cyclonic storms were observed during the period, out of which 4 were observed during winter and fall seasons. Mid-tropospheric, large-scale processes and local features were responsible for the initial development of all weather systems. The Mediterranean Sea plays a significant role in cyclogenesis and propagation of the systems the Caspian region. Further, a Mediterranean cyclonic system formed during October 2001 was studied in detail using backward trajectory Lagrangian model: Hybrid Single Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory (HYSPLIT). The HYSPLIT model outputs confirmed the observed synoptic features for the weather system of the case study.