Thermodynamic and kinematic flow characteristics of some developing and non-developing disturbances in predict

Abstract

The development of tropical disturbances into tropical cyclones is not well understood. The lack of data on developing and non-developing tropical disturbances makes theoretical models difficult to test empirically. This thesis will investigate thermodynamic parameters and kinematic flow structures found in three tropical disturbances investigated in the Pre-Depression Investigation of Cloud-Systems in the Tropics (PREDICT) Experiment. Two of the tropical disturbances did not develop into tropical storms, and one of the tropical disturbances was immediately classified as a tropical storm after the first research flight was conducted on the system. The presence of significant convective available potential energy (CAPE) and low convective inhibition (CIN) has been universally found in the vicinity of the tropical disturbances studied in this thesis and other recent PREDICT studies, such as Observations of the Convective Environment in Developing and Non-Developing Tropical Disturbances by Roger K. Smith and Michael T. Montgomery published in 2012 by the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. The main difference between developing and non-developing tropical disturbances appears to lie with the kinematic flow boundary structure and thermodynamic properties hypothesized in the marsupial paradigm.