Physically based storm transposition of four Atlantic tropical cyclones

Abstract

In this article, a method for the storm transposition of tropical cyclones is presented. This method is physically based as it uses a regional atmospheric model to reconstruct the precipitation depth field from a tropical cyclone, thus crucially conserving the mass, momentum and energy in the system. In this physically based storm transposition method, the tropical cyclone vortex in the simulation initial conditions is first shifted spatially. More precisely, the tropical cyclone at the simulation start date is first separated from its background environment, then shifted, and finally recombined with the background environment. Afterwards, the regional atmospheric model is run as usual to simulate the shifted tropical cyclone and its precipitation depth field. The storm transposition method was then applied to four hurricanes which spawned torrential precipitation in the United States: Hurricanes Floyd (1999), Frances (2004), Ivan (2004), and Isaac (2012), in order to maximize the 72-h precipitation depth over the drainage basin of the city of Asheville, NC. It was observed that the precipitation depth fields changed in both structure and intensity after the physically based storm transposition. Besides, the tropical cyclone tracks were generally very sensitive to changes in the initial conditions, which is expected for a storm system whose dynamics is strongly nonlinear. In particular, it was found that a small change in the location of the initial tropical cyclone vortex may result in a very different track, allowing the tropical cyclone's precipitation depth field to move over the target area.

Keywords: Dynamical downscaling; Intense precipitation; Physically based; Probable Maximum Precipitation; Storm transposition; Tropical cyclone.