Tropical cyclones vertical structure from GNSS radio occultation: an archive covering the period 2001–2018
2020
Abstract. Tropical cyclones (TC) are natural destructive phenomena,
which affect wide tropical and subtropical areas every year. Although the
correct prediction of their tracks and intensity has improved over recent
years, the knowledge about their structure and development is still
insufficient. The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) radio
occultation (RO) technique can provide a better understanding of the TC
because it enables us to probe the atmospheric vertical structure with high
accuracy, high vertical resolution and global coverage in any weather
conditions. In this work, we create an archive of co-located TC best tracks
and RO profiles covering the period 2001–2018 and providing a complete view
of the storms since the pre-cyclone status to the cyclone disappearance. We
collected 1822 TC best tracks from the International Best Track Archive for
Climate Stewardship and co-located them with 48 313 RO profiles from seven
satellite missions processed by the Wegener Center for Climate and Global
Change. We provide information about location and intensity of the TC, RO
vertical profiles co-located within 3 h and 500 km from the TC eye
centre, and exact information about temporal and spatial distance between
the TC centre and the RO mean tangent point. A statistical analysis shows
how the archive covers all the ocean basins and all the intensity
categories well. We finally demonstrate the application of this dataset to
investigate the vertical structure for one TC example case. All the data
files, separately for each TC, are publicly available in NetCDF format at
https://doi.org/10.25364/WEGC/TC-RO1.0:2020.1 (Lasota et al.,
2020).
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