Improving our Understanding of Tropical Cyclone Genesis

The primary question to be addressed is to understand the mesoscale and microphysical differences between cloud clusters that do develop into tropical cyclones and those that do not. Because the problem is not just an issue of the differences of structure within the cloud cluster itself, but is also an issue of how the cloud cluster interacts with the surrounding large-scale environment, a two-tiered approach is planned. In the first part of the research, the work of Ritchie 1995, Ritchie and Holland 1997, and Simpson et al. 1997 is extended via a series of simulations that incorporate the general structure of the western North Pacific environment but changes the mesoscale details of the cloud cluster under investigation. Through a series of high-resolution sensitivity simulations we can