Computing Deep-Tropospheric Vertical Wind Shear Analyses for Tropical Cyclone Applications: Does the Methodology Matter?

Abstract

ertical wind shear is well known in the tropical cyclone (TC) forecasting community as an important environmental influence on storm structure and intensity change. The traditional way to define deep-tropospheric vertical wind shear in most prior research studies, and in operational forecast applications, is to simply use the vector difference of the 200- and 850-hPa wind fields based on global model analyses. However, is this rather basic approach to approximate vertical wind shear adequate for most TC applications? In this study, the traditional approach is compared to a different methodology for generating fields of vertical wind shear as produced by the University of Wisconsin Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS). The CIMSS fields are derived with heavy analysis weight given to available high-density satellite-derived winds. The resultant isobaric analyses are then used to create two mass-weighted layer-mean wind fields, one upper and one lower tropospheric, which are then differenced to produce the deep-tropospheric vertical wind shear field. The principal novelty of this approach is that it does not rely simply on the analyzed winds at two discrete levels, but instead attempts to account for some of the variable vertical wind structure in the calculation. It will be shown how the resultant vertical wind shear fields derived by the two approaches can diverge significantly in certain situations; the results also suggest that in many cases it is superior in depicting the wind structure's impact on TCs than the simple two-level differential that serves as the common contemporary vertical wind shear approximation.