Sensitivity of hurricane intensity forecasts to physical initialization

Summary

Intensity forecasts of a hurricane are shown to be quite sensitive to the initial meso-convective scale precipitation distributions. These are included within the data assimilation using a physical initialization that was developed at Florida State University. We show a case study of a hurricane forecast where the inclusion of the ‘observed’ precipitation did provide reasonable intensity forecasts. Further experimentation with the inclusion or exclusion of individual meso-convective rainfall elements, around and over the storm, shows that the intensity forecasts were quite sensitive to these initial rainfall distributions. The exclusion of initial rain in the inner rain area of a hurricane leads to a much reduced intensity forecast, whereas that impact is less if the rainfall of an outer rain band was initially excluded.

Intensity forecasts of hurricanes may be sensitive to a number of factors such as sea surface temperature anomalies, presence or absence of concentric eye walls, potential vorticity interactions in the upper troposphere and other environmental factors.

This paper is a sequel to a recent study, Krishnamurti et al., 1997, on the prediction of hurricane OPAL of 1995 that was a category III storm over the Gulf of Mexico. In that study we showed successful forecasts of the storm intensity from the inclusion of observed rainfall distributions within physical initialization. In that paper we examined the issues of diabatic potential vorticity and the angular momentum in order to diagnose the storm intensity. All of the terms of the complete Ertel potential vorticity equation were evaluated and it was concluded that the diabatic contributions to the potential vorticity were quite important for the diagnosis of the storm's intensity. The present paper addresses some sensitivity issues related to the individual mesoconvective precipitating elements.