A QuikSCAT climatology of tropical cyclone size
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چکیده
A QuikSCAT climatology of tropical cyclone size. Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. [1] QuikSCAT data of near‐surface wind vectors for the years 1999–2008 are used to create a climatology of tropical cyclone (TC) size, defined as the radius of vanishing winds. The azimuthally‐averaged radius of 12 ms −1 wind (r 12) is calculated for a subset of TCs (N = 2154) whose centers of circulation were clearly identifiable via subjective analysis of the QuikSCAT‐analyzed wind field. The outer radius, r 0 , is determined from r 12 using an outer wind structure model that assumes no deep convection beyond r 12. The global median values of r 12 and r 0 are 197 km and 423 km, respectively, with statistically significant variation across ocean basins. The global distribution of r 12 is found to be approximately log‐normal, the distribution of r 0 is quantitatively much closer to log‐normal, and the improvement in fit between r 12 and r 0 is attributed to the combined effect of the nature of the model employed and the paired distributions of r 12 and f. Moreover, the normalization employed by Dean et al. (2009) is found to weaken rather than improve the log‐ normal fit. Finally, within a given storm, both r 12 and r 0 tend to expand very slowly with time early in the storm lifecycle and then becomes quasi‐constant, though significant variance exists across storms.
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