# Presentation: 925494

## Development of a Secondary Eyewall Formation Index for Improvement of Tropical Cyclone Intensity Forecasting

**Development of a Secondary Eyewall Formation Index for Improvement of Tropical Cyclone Intensity Forecasting**
- James Kossin1, Howard Berger1, Jeffrey Hawkins2, John Knaff3,
- Mark DeMaria4, and Thomas Cram3
- 1CIMSS, UW-Madison, Madison, WI
- 2Naval Research Laboratory, Monterey, CA
- 3CIRA, CSU, Fort Collins, CO
- 4NOAA/NESDIS/RAMMB Team

## This work has been supported by the NOAA Hurricane Supplemental Research Program and NRL-MRY Satellite Applications Grant N00173-01-C-2024.

## Climatology of tropical cyclone intensity change (Emanuel 2000):

- ~ +12 m/s per day for ~5 days, then ~ –8 m/s per day until end of life

- But there are two identifiable classes of storms that behave differently and introduce systematic errors into intensity forecasts:
- Storms undergoing eyewall replacement cycles.
- Storms that become “annular” (Knaff et al. 2003).

## Intensity forecast errors

- Annular Hurricanes are systematically under-forecast

- OFCL 24-hour forecast bias increases from –0.8 kt to –6.0 kt
- OFCL 36-hour forecast bias increases from –1.7 kt to –10.8 kt
- Mean absolute error increases by 23% at 36 h.

## Intensity forecast errors

- Secondary eyewall formation (SEF) signals the onset of an eyewall replacement cycle (ERC). Contrary to annular hurricanes, storms undergoing an ERC are systematically *over*-forecast.

- Mean absolute error increases by 16 – 20% out to 48 h.

|  | 12 h | 24 h | 36 h | 48 h |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| SEF cases | +1.5 | +2.4 | +3.1 | +3.7 |
| Non-SEF cases | –0.4 | –1.4 | –2.9 | –4.6 |

- OFCL Forecast bias (kt). Vmax > 100 kt

## SEF climatology

- 80% of storms that reach 140 kt or greater undergo SEF

- SEF-yes storms: N = 44
- SEF-no storms:  N = 53

## SEF climatology

- When a storm is at 130 kt, there is a 40% of SEF at any time (at least 24 h after any previous ERC).

- SEF-yes best track fixes: N = 263
- SEF-no best track fixes:  N = 715

## Formation of an objective index to diagnose SEF

- _Data_ (*global*):
- SSM/I and TMI data.
- Reanalysis fields (vorticity, divergence, shear, moisture, etc).
- SST fields.
- Geostationary IR data (ATL only at present).

## Method

- Composite analyses of SEF-yes versus SEF-no.
- Feature extraction from the composite analyses.
- Apply features to Classification algorithms.

## Results (simple two-variate example)

- _Results_ (simple two-variate example)

- Microwave composites

- Axes are km from center

## SST composites

## Linear Discriminating (Classifier) Function

- _Linear Discriminating (Classifier) Function_

**x** = sample means

- Predicts group membership — Yes or No.

## Bayes Classifier

- _Bayes Classifier_

- Combines *a priori* (climatological) probability of group membership and probability of membership based on feature values. Probability density in feature phase-space is determined by the method of K-nearest neighbors.

- Provides probability of SEF

## Concluding remarks

- They will give the forecaster a probability of SEF based on real-time measurements from analyses and satellites. This in turn will alert the forecaster to the onset of an ERC and the associated intensity changes that are expected, even though all other factors may be saying otherwise*.*
- We expect to formulate algorithms that include Microwave-based parameters and similar algorithms that do not rely on this data. This will allow us to run the algorithm more often, but use the MW data when it’s available.
- The algorithms will be combined with a similar index that diagnoses the formation of annular hurricanes, and is presently being constructed in a joint effort by members of the NOAA/NESDIS/RAMMB team at Colorado State University. Since annular hurricanes tend to maintain a more steady intensity while they are annular, they represent a very different population than storms that undergo ERCs and exhibit more intensity variance than average during the eyewall replacement.

- _Concluding remarks_