The Relationship between Tropical Cyclone Intensity Change and the Strength of Inner-Core Convection
Authors: Jiang Haiyan 
Published: December 2011

Convective intensity proxies measured by the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Microwave Imager (TMI), Precipitation Radar (PR), and Visible and Infrared Scanner (VIRS) are used to assess the relationship between intense convection in the inner core and tropical cyclone (TC) intensity change. Using the cumulative distribution functions of 24-h intensity changes from the 1998–2008 best-track data for global TCs, five intensity change categories are defined: rapidly intensifying (RI), slowly intensifying, neutral, slowly weakening, and rapidly weakening. TRMM observations of global TCs during 1998–2008 are used to generate the distributions of convective properties in the storm’s inner-core region for different storm intensity change categories. To examine the hypothesis of hot towers near the eye as an indicator of RI, hot towers are defined by precipitation features with 20-dBZ radar echo height reaching 14.5 km.

The differences in the convective parameters between rapidly intensifying TCs and slowly intensifying, neutral, slowly weakening, and rapidly weakening TCs are quantified using statistical analysis. It is found that statistically significant differences of three out of four convective intensity parameters in the inner core exist between RI and non-RI storms. Between RI and slowly intensifying TCs, a statistically significant difference exists for the minimum 11-μm IR brightness temperature TB11 in the inner core. This indicates that a relationship does exist between inner-core convective intensity and TC intensity change. The results in this study also suggest that the rate of intensification appears to be influenced by convective activity in the inner core and the ability to predict RI might be further improved by using convective parameters. With regard to different convective proxies, the relationships are different. The minimum TB11, upper-level maximum radar reflectivities, and maximum 20-dBZ radar echo height in the inner core are best associated with the rate of TC intensity change, while the minimum 85-GHz polarization corrected brightness temperature (PCT) shows some ambiguities in relation to intensity change. The minimum 37-GHz PCT shows no significant relationship with TC intensity change, probably because of the contamination of the ice scattering signal by emission from rain and liquid water in this channel.

By examining the probability of RI for each convective parameter for which statistically significant differences at the 95% level were found of RI and non-RI cases, it is found that all three parameters provide additional information relative to climatology. The most skillful parameter is minimum TB11, and the second is maximum 20-dBZ height, followed by minimum 85-GHz PCT. However, the increases of RI probability from the larger sample mean by using these predictors are not very large.

When using the existence of hot towers as a predictor, it is found that the probabilities of RI and slowly intensifying increase and those of slowly weakening and rapidly weakening decrease for samples with hot towers in the inner core. However, the increases for intensifying and decreases for weakening are not substantial, indicating that hot towers are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for RI.