Monitoring of Tropical Cyclones at Enhanced Resolution

Accurate knowledge of Tropical Cyclone (TC) inner-core structures contributes to a better understanding of TC thermodynamics. The Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) can measure ocean surface winds at a good spatial-temporal coverage, but the TC inner structures are largely blurred by its 20-km footprint. In this study, the Two-Dimensional Variational (2DVAR) scheme is considered to enhance the TC inner-core structure, by "learning" background spatial error covariances from high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) winds. We find that the length scales of the stream function are close to the radii of maximum wind speeds and length scales of the velocity potential are dependent on TC asymmetry scales. All these parameters can be provided by ASCAT data. Experimental results prove that the proposed method can enhance TC inner-core structures and thus achieve super-resolution. The promising results contribute to our long-term goal of developing a general method for providing TC inner-core structures from all scatterometer winds available for nowcasting, allowing temporal monitoring of TC winds.