Tropical cyclones — known as typhoons in the Pacific and as hurricanes in the Atlantic — are fierce, complex storm systems that cause loss of human life and billions of dollars in damage every year.
Tropical cyclones — known as typhoons in the Pacific and as hurricanes in the Atlantic — are fierce, complex storm systems that cause loss of human life and billions of dollars in damage every year. For decades, scientists have studied each storm, striving to understand the system yet unable to fully measure every intricate variable. Now, the convergence of new observational tools and the launch of an inclusive database may elucidate the innerworkings of tropical cyclones in the Western North Pacific and South China Sea.
Three papers were published in the latest issue of Advances in Atmospheric Science (AAS). One paper, led by the Chinese Meteorological Administration (CMA), focuses on a new tropical cyclone database, and the other two, led by The Petrel Meteorological Observation Experiment Project (Petrel Project) of the CMA, and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences respectively, reports an extensive marine observing experiment based on unmanned vehicles.
"The improvement of tropical cyclones prediction accuracy depends not only on the understanding of tropical cyclone dynamics but also on the accuracy of tropical cyclone location and intensity estimations, which is the basis of operational tropical cyclone prediction and research," said LU Xiaoqin, Shanghai Typhoon Institute, CMA, and Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Tropical Cyclone, CMA. LU was first author on the CMA tropical cyclone database paper.
With eight separate datasets, including one compiled by the CMA with measurements dating to 1949, the database comprises historical or real-time locations, intensity, dynamic and thermal structures, wind strengths, precipitation amounts, frequency and more, according to LU.
Read more at Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
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