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Filling the gap of wind observations inside tropical cyclones
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  • Frederic Tridon,
  • Alessandro Battaglia,
  • Ali Rizik,
  • Anthony J. Illingworth
Frederic Tridon
Politecnico di Torino

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Alessandro Battaglia
U Leicester
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Ali Rizik
Politecnico di Torino
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Anthony J. Illingworth
University of Reading
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Abstract

The WIVERN (WInd VElocity Radar Nephoscope) mission, currently under the Phase-0 of the ESA Earth Explorer program, promises to provide new insight in the coupling between winds and microphysics by globally observing, for the first time, vertical profiles of horizontal winds in cloudy areas. The objective of this work is to explore the potential of the WIVERN conically scanning Doppler 94GHz radar for filling the wind observation gap inside tropical cyclones. To this aim, realistic WIVERN notional observations of TCs are produced by combining the CloudSat 94GHz radar reflectivity observations from 2007 to 2009 with ECMWF co-located winds. Despite the short wavelength of the radar (3mm), which causes strong attenuation in presence of large amount of liquid hydrometeors, the system can profile most of the tropical cyclones, particularly the cloudy areas above the freezing level and the precipitating stratiform regions. The statistical analysis of the results shows that, (i) because of its lower sensitivity, a nadir pointing WIVERN would detect 80% of the clouds (60% of winds with 3m/s accuracy) observed by CloudSat, (ii) but thanks to its scanning capability, WIVERN would actually provide 52 times more observations of clouds (40~times more observations of horizontal winds) than CloudSat in TCs, (iii) this corresponds to more than 400 (300) million observations of clouds (accurate winds) every year. Such observations could be used in data assimilation models in order to improve numerical weather prediction and by modellers in order to shed light on the physical processes underpinning the evolution of tropical cyclones.
16 Jun 2023Submitted to ESS Open Archive
23 Jun 2023Published in ESS Open Archive