Hurricane Spiral Bands

Abstract

The spiral bands that occur in tropical cyclones can be conveniently divided into two classes?outer bands and inner bands. Evidence is presented here that the outer bands form as the result of nonlinear effects during the breakdown of the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) through barotropic instability. In this process a zonal strip of high potential vorticity (the ITCZ shear zone or monsoon trough) begins to distort in a varicose fashion, with the potential vorticity (PV) becoming pooled in local regions that are connected by filaments of high PV. As the pooled regions become more axisymmetric, the filaments become thinner and begin to wrap around the PV centers. It is argued that inner bands form in a different manner. As a tropical cyclone intensifies due to latent heat release, the PV field becomes nearly circular with the highest values of PV in the cyclone center. The radial gradient of PV provides a state on which PV waves (the generalization of Rossby waves) can propagate. The nonlinear breaking of PV waves then leads to an irreversible distortion of the PV contours and a downgradient flux of PV. The continuation of this proem tends to erode the high PV core of the tropical cyclone, to produce a surrounding surf zone, and hence to spread the PV horizontally. In a similar fashion, inner bands can also form by the merger of a vortex with a patch of relatively high PV air. As the merger proem occurs the patch of PV is quickly elongated and wrapped around the vortex. The resulting vortex is generally larger in horizontal extent and exhibits a spiral band of PV. When the formation of outer and inner bands is interpreted in the context of a normal-mode spectral model, they emerge as slow manifold phenomena; that is, they have both rotational and (balanced or slaved) gravitational mode aspects. In this sense, regarding them as simply gravity waves leads to an incomplete dynamical picture.