Poster Presentation AMOS Annual Meeting and International Conference on Tropical Meteorology and Oceanography

The Influence of Satellite Observation Angle to Tropical Cyclone Intensity Estimation Using the Deviation Angle Variance Technique (#1067)

Liang Hu 1 , Elizabeth A Ritchie 1 , Scott Tyo 1
  1. UNSW Canberra, Canberra, ACT, Australia

     The deviation angle variance technique (DAV-T), a method that quantifies the axisymmetry of a tropical cyclone from satellite data to characterize the dynamics of tropical cyclones was described by Pineros et al. (2008, 2011).   Based on 12 years (2004-2015) GOES-East satellite IR image over North Atlantic basin, the diurnal cycle of the TC DAV value is analysed first, and a backward 24-hr time average DAV is selected to filter the noise in the DAV-TC intensity estimation. The effect of satellite observation angle on the DAV-TC intensity estimation is analysed in theory, in a case study, and in the longer-term statistics. Based on these results, an improvement to the DAV-TC intensity estimation is presented and evaluated in this study. The results show that, after taking the observation angle into account, the new DAV-TC intensity estimation is shown to produce smaller errors and higher correlations than the previous versions, especially for major hurricanes.