The impacts of numerical schemes on asymmetric hurricane intensification
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Authors
Guimond, Steve
Reisner, Jon
Marras, Simone
Giraldo, Frank
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Date of Issue
2015
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University of Maryland
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Abstract
The fundamental pathways for tropical cyclone (TC) intensification are explored by considering axisymmetric and asymmetric impulsive thermal perturbation to balanced, TC-like vortices using the dynamic cores of three different nonlinear numerical models. Attempts at reproducing the results of previous work, which used the community model WRF (Nolan and Grasso 2003; N603), revealed a discrepancy with the impacts of purely asymmetric thermal forcing. The current study finds that thermal asymmetries can have an important, largely positive role on the vortex intensification whereas N603 and other studies find that asymmetric impacts are negligible.
Analysis of the spectral energetics of each numerical model indicates that the vortex response to asymmetric thermal perturbations is significantly dumped in WRF relative to the other models. Spectral kinetic energy budgets show that this anomalous damping is primarily due to the increased removal of kinetic energy from the vertical divergence of the vertical pressure flux, which is related to the flux of inertia-gravity wave energy. The increased energy in the other two models is shown to originate around the scales of the heating and propagate upscale with time from nonlinear effects. For very large thermal amplitudes (50 K) the anomalous removal of kinetic energy due to inertia-gravity wave activity is much smaller resulting in good agreement between models.
The results of this paper indicate that the numerical treatment of small-scale processes that project strongly onto inertia-gravity wave energy can lead to significant differences in asymmetric TC intensification. Sensitivity tests with different time integration schemes suggest that diffusion entering into the implicit solution procedure is partly responsible for the anomalous dumping of energy.
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Poster
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Paper No. NG23A-1777
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Applied Mathematics
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Los Alamos National Laboratory
Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics
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This research was supported by the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
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This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.