Journal
JOURNAL OF THE ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES
Volume 76, Issue 12, Pages 3773-3783Publisher
AMER METEOROLOGICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1175/JAS-D-19-0128.1
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- U.K.-China Research and Innovation Partnership Fund through the Met Office Climate Science for Service Partnership China as part of the Newton Fund
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [41706007]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
There have been no high-frequency aircraft observations of tropical cyclone (TC) eyewall boundary layer turbulence since two flights into Atlantic hurricanes in the 1980s. We present an analysis of the first TC boundary layer flight observations in the South China Sea by the Hong Kong Observatory comprising four eyewall penetrations. We derive the vertical flux of momentum and vertical momentum diffusivity from observed turbulence parameters. We observe negative (upward) vertical fluxes of tangential momentum near the eyewall consistent with a jet below the flight level near the radius of maximum wind. Our observations of vertical momentum diffusivity support a superlinear relationship between diffusivity and wind speed at the high wind speeds in the inner-core of TCs (power-law exponent of 1.73 +/- 0.20) while the few existing boundary layer hurricane observations in the North Atlantic suggest a more linear relationship.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available