Sensitivity Studies of Tropical Storm Genesis Using a Numerical Model

Abstract

This study investigates two cases of the FGGE III-B tropical cyclone genesis study of Tuleya (1988) in more detail. These two cases occurred within a week of one another in the tropical North Atlantic in August 1979. One disturbance developed into Hurricane David, the other did not develop past the depression stage. At one point in their evolution the disturbances had quite similar values of low-level vorticity. In the developing case of Hurricane David, the disturbance propagated along in a low-level wave trough with an accompanying high wind maximum. In the nondeveloping case the initial disturbance was also embedded in a wave trough with an associated wind maximum. This low-level wave propagated westward leaving the depression in its wake. The different environmental flow was responsible for the different behavior. Synoptic and budget analyses revealed significant differences in disturbance structure and vorticity and equivalent potential temperature tendencies at the time of approximate equal strength of the two disturbances. The evolution of these two disturbances was quite robust even to reasonable increases to the initial relative humidity. Supplementary experiments of the developing case were performed by altering the sea surface temperature and surface evaporation. It was found that the difference in storm evolution was minor in a case when climatological mean values of sea surface temperatures were specified. The climatological mean values were ?0.5 K lower than the August 1979 mean used in the control simulation. In addition, an experiment without evaporation led to a propagating easterly wave with little development. Furthermore, when the evaporation was specified to a climatological constant value, there was intensification into a weak tropical storm with a rather peculiar structure. Apparently, at least in this case, processes other than evaporation-wind feedback led to moderate storm intensification.