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Impact of different climatic flows on typhoon tracks

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Abstract

A tropical cyclone (TC) vortex is considered to be embedded in and steered by a large-scale environmental flow. The environmental flow can be decomposed into two parts: temporal climatic flow and anomaly. The former is defined according to the calendar climatology with a diurnal cycle and a seasonal cycle. Thus, the temporal climatic flow of the atmosphere, which can be estimated using reanalysis data, varies with regions, altitudes, and hours. The impact of different climatic flows on TC tracks in the Northwest Pacific is examined using a simple generalized beta-advection model. Results show that the predicted tracks of two TC cases have large deviations from their best tracks in the following 1–2 days if the temporal climatic wind is replaced by other hourly climatic winds on the same calendar day or by a several-day-mean climatic wind. The track deviation is more significant when the climatic wind difference is larger than 2 m s−1. This experiment reconfirms that a TC track is influenced by temporal climatic flow and interaction with other disturbances in the vicinity.

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Acknowledgements

The work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41375073) and the Global Change and Air-Sea Interaction Program (GASI-03-02-01-02).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Wei-hong Qian & Jing Huang

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  1. Wei-hong Qian
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  2. Jing Huang
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Correspondence to Wei-hong Qian.

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Responsible Editor: F. Mesinger.

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Qian, Wh., Huang, J. Impact of different climatic flows on typhoon tracks. Meteorol Atmos Phys 130, 137–152 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00703-017-0515-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00703-017-0515-z

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