Tropical Cyclone Center and Symmetric Structure Estimating From SMAP Data

Abstract

We propose a methodology to estimate the tropical cyclone (TC) center location associated with the additional TC parameters of the radius of maximum wind (RMW) and intensity, purely from ocean winds observed by the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) radiometer. This method assumes a symmetric vortex. To demonstrate the method, we analyze 28 SMAP wind fields collected during 11 TCs. Verification of the estimated hurricane centers and wind distributions along the radius is compared with measurements provided by the airborne Stepped Frequency Microwave Radiometer (SFMR) collected during its flying through hurricane cores and to sea surface wind fields derived from spaceborne synthetic aperture radar data. The significance of this simple method is that TC centers, intensities, and RMW can be estimated purely from SMAP wind products, despite SMAP’s low spatial resolution. Comparing these 28 model results to the aircraft measurement (f-deck) and the best track (BT) data, we show that for the latitudes and longitudes of the TC centers, the standard deviations are 0.28° and 0.29°, respectively, both with a correlation of 1.00. For the detected intensity, the standard deviation is 8.11 m/s, and the correlation is 0.84. We note that the TC intensity detected by this method can be even stronger than the maximum winds observed by the relatively low-resolution SMAP observations.