Sharp, Kevin Joseph (M.A., Geography) The Influence of Landfall Variation on Tropical Cyclone Losses in the United States as Simulated by HAZUS Thesis directed by Dr. William R. Travis Tropical cyclone losses in the United States have shown an increasing trend since the beginning of the 20 century. This is mainly due to increased exposure along America’s coast. The amount of coastal property at...

Extreme orogenic convective storms in southeastern South America are divided into three categories: storms with deep convective cores, storms with wide convective cores, and storms containing broad stratiform regions. Data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite’s Precipitation Radar show that storms with wide convective cores are the most frequent, tending to originate near the ...

[1] An analysis of thunderstorm environment, structure, and evolution associated with six gigantic jets (five negative polarity, one positive) was conducted. Three of these gigantic jets were observed within detection range of very high frequency lightning mapping networks. All six were within range of operational radars and two-dimensional lightning network coverage: five within the National L...

Tropical cyclones spend most of their life cycle over the tropical and subtropical oceans. Because of the lack of in situ data in these regions, satellite observations are fundamental for tracking and estimating the intensity of these storms for real-time forecasting and monitoring climate trends. This chapter reviews methods for estimating tropical cyclone intensity from satellites, including ...

A recently developed technique for simulating large [O(10(4))] numbers of tropical cyclones in climate states described by global gridded data is applied to simulations of historical and future climate states simulated by six Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5) global climate models. Tropical cyclones downscaled from the climate of the period 1950-2005 are compared with those of the...

Tropical storms simulated by a nine-member ensemble of GCM integrations forced by observed SSTs have been tracked by an objective procedure for the period 1980–88. Statistics on tropical storm frequency, intensity, and first location have been produced. Statistical tools such as the chi-square and the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test indicate that there is significant potential predictability of interan...

[1] On the basis of simulations of hurricane Katrina in August 2005 with the advanced Weather and Research Forecasting (WRF) model at 4 km resolution without parameterized convection, empirical relationships are computed between the maximum simulated wind and the surface fluxes and precipitation and provide a reasonable fit to the data. The best track data set of global observed tropical cyclon...

The issue of the relationship between the central mean sealevel pressure (Pc) and maximum mean near-surface wind* (the wind-pressure relationship, hereafter WPR) in a tropical cyclone (TC) has been the subject of ongoing debate for many decades and a number of relationships have been developed during this period. This is demonstrated by the fact that the three Australian Tropical Cyclone Warnin...

In this project, we develop an objective and automatic intensity estimator of Tropical Cyclones (TCs) based on satellite infrared (IR) imagery. The proposed methodology analyzes the TC’s shape or pattern to perform the intensity estimates, which will be available every 30 minutes (or depending on image acquisition availability) for the Atlantic, Eastern North Pacific and Western North Pacific b...

Results from a three-layer asymmetric hurricane model previously described by the authors are compared with results from an axially symmetric analog to investigate the effect of the symmetry assumption on the internal dynarnics of model cyclones. The symmetric model storm initially develops more rapidly then the asymmetric storm. The differences in intensity during the first 100 hr are related ...