The Gradient Velocity Track Display (GrVTD) Technique for Retrieving Tropical Cyclone Primary Circulation from Aliased Velocities Measured by Single-Doppler Radar

Abstract

Abstract The ground-based velocity track display (GBVTD) technique was developed to estimate the primary circulations of landfalling tropical cyclones (TCs) from single-Doppler radar data. However, GBVTD cannot process aliased Doppler velocities, which are often encountered in intense TCs. This study presents a new gradient velocity track display (GrVTD) algorithm that is essentially immune to the Doppler velocity aliasing. GrVTD applies the concept of gradient velocity–azimuth display (GVAD) to the GBVTD method. A GrVTD-simplex algorithm is also developed to accompany GrVTD as a self-sufficient algorithm suite. The results from idealized experiments demonstrate that the circulation center and winds retrieved from GrVTD with aliased velocity and GBVTD with dealiased velocity are in good agreement, but GrVTD is more sensitive to random observation errors. GrVTD was applied to Hurricane Charley (2004) where the majority of the Doppler velocities of the inner-core region were aliased. The GrVTD-retrieved circulation pattern and magnitude are nearly identical to those retrieved in GBVTD with manually dealiased velocities. Overall, the performance of GrVTD is comparable but is more sensitive to the data distribution than that of the original GBVTD using dealiased velocity. GrVTD can be used as a preprocessor for dealiasing velocity in TCs before the data are used in GBVTD or other algorithms.