Citation

Wu L, Liu Q, Li Y. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2018; 115(33): 8307-8310.

Affiliation

Key Laboratory of Meteorological Disaster of Ministry of Education, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, National Academy of Sciences)

DOI

10.1073/pnas.1807217115

PMID

30061409

Abstract

Analyses of datasets from manned research flights that penetrated hurricane eyes and tropical cyclone (TC) damage surveys strongly suggest the existence of tornado-scale vortices in the turbulent boundary layer of the TC eyewall. However, their small horizontal scale, their fast movement, and the associated severe turbulence make the tornado-scale vortex very difficult to observe directly. To understand tornado-scale vortices in the TC eyewall and their influence on the TC vortex, mesoscale rainbands, and convective clouds, a numerical experiment including seven nested domains with the smallest horizontal grid interval of 37 m is conducted to perform a large eddy simulation (LES) with the Advanced Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model. We show that most of the observed features associated with tornado-scale vortices can be realistically simulated in the WRF-LES framework. The numerical simulation confirms the existence of simulated tornado-scale vortices in the turbulent boundary layer of the TC eyewall. Our numerical experiment suggests that tornado-scale vortices are prevalent at the inner edge of the intense eyewall convection.

Copyright © 2018 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.

Language: en

Keywords

large eddy simulation; tornado-scale vortex; tropical cyclone eyewall