Associations of Hurricane Intensity Changes to Satellite Total Column Ozone Structural Changes Within Hurricanes

Hurricane top structures are not well captured by airborne or dropsonde observations. Total column ozone (TCO) observations provided by the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) Nadir Mapper (NM) onboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) satellite are employed in an investigation of hurricane top structures. We show that the OMPS NM TCO data can capture the top structures of Hurricane Maria (2017) over the Atlantic Ocean. An observed local maximum of TCO in the eye region reveals a strong upper tropospheric downward motion that lowers the tropopause above the hurricane eye. A rainband-like distribution of low TCO content reflects strong convection areas where the tropopause is raised and well correlates spatially with the high cloud top regions derived from the S-NPP Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). A sixth-order even polynomial fitting is used to reveal the TCO radial structures by introducing two characteristic parameters. One is a radial distance parameter (
$R_{\mathrm {TCO}}$
) representing the spatial range, and the other is an intensity parameter defined as the TCO difference from the hurricane center to 600-km radial distance from the hurricane center (
$\Delta {\mathrm {TCO}}_{600\,{\mathrm {km}}} $
). Based on an analysis of ten hurricanes over the Northern Atlantic Ocean in 2017, we show that before a hurricane reaches its maximum strength, there is always a decrease of
$R_{\mathrm {TCO}}$
and an increase of
$\Delta {\mathrm {TCO}}_{600\,{\mathrm {km}}} $
. It is anticipated that more accurate initial hurricanes could be produced if the TCO structures were combined with other surface, near surface, and tropospheric information in vortex initialization.