[Eoas-seminar] MET Seminar This Thursday Jan 26 - Dr. Erin Munsell (RMS)

[eoas-seminar at lists.fsu.edu]

Dear all,

Please join us this Thursday January 26 for our first Meteorology seminar of the semester, given by Dr. Erin Munsell. Dr. Munsell recently joined RMS HWind here in Tallahassee as a tropical cyclone modeler. She previously was an assistant research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/UMD ESSIC. She will speak about “Examining the dynamics and structure of rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones with high temporal frequency satellite observations” (abstract below).

Dr. Munsell will be joining us IN PERSON. Please join us in EOA 1044 at 3 PM for refreshments prior to to the beginning of the talk at 3:15 PM.

Graduate students are invited to join a student-only lunch with the speaker at 12:30 PM in EOA 6067. This is a great opportunity to meet the speaker in a casual setting - and have some free food :-) Please RSVP to Allison Wing (awing at fsu.edu<mailto:awing at fsu.edu>) by the end of the day Wednesday so we know how much food to order.

Dr. Munsell is also available for individual meetings on Thursday. If you’d like to meet with her, please contact Allison Wing (awing at fsu.edu<mailto:awing at fsu.edu>).

We look forward to seeing you all on Thursday!

DATE: Thursday January 26
STUDENT LUNCH: 12:30 PM, EOA 6067
SEMINAR TIME: Refreshments at 3 PM, Talk 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM.
SEMINAR LOCATION: EOA 1044
SPEAKER: Dr. Erin Munsell

TITLE: Examining the dynamics and structure of rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones with high temporal frequency satellite observations

ABSTRACT: Over the past 10–15 years, considerable effort has been directed toward improving tropical cyclone (TC) intensity prediction. Despite this effort, the operational prediction of TC formation and significant changes in intensity, such as rapid intensification (RI), remain particularly challenging, as these events are typically less predictable due to being more significantly governed by rapidly-evolving moist convective processes that occur in the TC’s inner-core. However, more recently, considerable attention has been given to assess the ability of exploiting the high temporal frequency afforded by satellite observations of TCs to both potentially reduce the uncertainty of forecasts of TC RI through advanced data assimilation techniques, as well as to improve our understanding of the rapidly-evolving dynamical processes associated with these events.
This study utilizes brightness temperatures (Tbs) captured by the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on NOAA/NASA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-16 (GOES-16) and synthetic 3-D temperature and moisture retrievals created for NASA’s upcoming Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) Mission to examine both the inner-core structure and the environment of rapidly intensifying TCs at a high temporal frequency. GOES-16 Tbs from the infrared longwave window band (Ch 14; 11.2 um) are analyzed to examine the strength and location of the developing convection of Hurricanes Harvey (2017), Maria (2017), and Michael (2018) throughout their lifetimes. The evolutions of the TCs’ coldest Tbs indicate that the inner-core convective activity began to increase in the 12 h prior to RI onset, primarily in 2–4-h substantial “bursts”, while substantial convection dominated essentially the entirety of the region within 100 km of the surface center within 12 h of the onset of intensification.
While certain information about a TC’s convective structure can be gleaned from the GOES-16 Tbs, they are still inherently limited by their inability to sense information below cloud tops. The upcoming TROPICS mission attempts to address this by utilizing CubeSats equipped with microwave radiometers to examine the three-dimensional thermodynamic structure of a TC at a high temporal frequency (median revisit rates of less than 1 h). In advance of the mission, synthetic retrievals of temperature and water vapor mixing ratio generated from the Hurricane Nature Run (HNR1; Nolan et al. 2013) are utilized to analyze the TC structure over a 10-day period that includes the HNR1 TC’s RI from a tropical storm to a major hurricane. Analyses are performed to assess how accurately TROPICS may be able to describe thermodynamic profiles both within the storm and in the environment by validating against the HNR1 model data.
It is found that the TROPICS retrievals compare mostly favorably with the HNR1 data at most heights and times with errors consistently less than the proposed mission requirements (2 K for temperature; 25% for humidity). In addition, the retrievals show the ability to qualitatively track extensive dry air that is present in the vicinity of the TC. Although a substantial dry bias is present within the storm region of the TC (between 0 – 200 km from the surface center) in the 350–550 mb layer in the TROPICS retrievals, this bias is reduced when the retrievals associated with precipitating grid points are removed from the analyses. However, despite this filtering, a significant bias remains, which suggests that the TROPICS retrievals will likely lose accuracy in regions of stronger scattering.


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Allison A. Wing, Ph.D.
Werner A. and Shirley B. Baum Professor
Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science
Florida State University
awing at fsu.edu

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