2A.1
Surface fluxes at high wind speeds deduced from dense dropwindsonde deployments in Hurricanes Fabian and Isabel
William D. Ramstrom, MIT, Cambridge, MA; and K. A. Emanuel
A major thrust of the CBLAST project is to obtain better estimates of air-sea fluxes of momentum and enthalpy at very high wind speeds. Our component of this project attempts to deduce such fluxes by carefully measuring the rate at which angular momentum and moist static energy flow across cylindrical surfaces in tropical cyclones. Previous efforts to do this resulted in reasonable estimates of surface fluxes over broad regions of the storm, but were too sparse to resolve the wind-dependence of the fluxes. Our CBLAST design called for the deployment of an exceptionally dense array of GPS dropwindsondes along radials, so as to resolve as much as feasible the radial dependence of the surface fluxes. We largely succeeded in carrying out such deployments in Hurricanes Fabian and Isabel of 2003. This paper will present some early results of estimating the surface fluxes and exchange coefficients as a function of wind speed in these two storms. .
Session 2A, CBLAST II
Monday, 3 May 2004, 10:45 AM-12:00 PM, Le Jardin Room
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