A Numerical Study of the Effect of Dissipative Heating on Tropical Cyclone Intensity

Abstract The impact of dissipative heating on tropical cyclone (TC) intensity forecasts is investigated using the U.S. Navy’s operational mesoscale model (the Coupled Ocean/Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System). A physically consistent method of including dissipative heating is developed based on turbulent kinetic energy dissipation to ensure energy conservation. Mean absolute forecast errors of track and surface maximum winds are calculated for eighteen 48-h simulations of 10 selected TC cases over both the Atlantic basin and the northwest Pacific. Simulation results suggest that the inclusion of dissipative heating improves surface maximum wind forecasts by 10%–20% at 15-km resolution, while it has little impact on the track forecasts. The resultant improvement from the inclusion of the dissipative heating increases to 29% for the surface maximum winds at 5-km resolution for Hurricane Isabel (2003), where dissipative heating produces an unstable layer at low levels and warms a deep layer of the tropos...