A tropical storm: Self‐organization and complexity

Abstract

This paper is aimed at investigating the interaction between a tropical storm (TS) and its adjacent mesoscale convective vortices (MCVs) using a barotropic primitive equation model. The results show that the interaction may result in vortex self‐organization. Compared with the case without MCVs, the quasi‐final state vortex becomes stronger with the increased kinetic energy and lower value of height at the vortex centre owing to the extra vorticity supplied by the MCVs. The intensity of the initial TS controls the complexity of the self‐organization process and determines whether the vorticity of MCVs is either fully or partially absorbed. The quasi‐final state vortex will either keep the intensity the initial TS has or decay dependently on the intensity or number of the MCVs, exhibiting the complexity of the characteristics of the organized quasi‐final state vortex.