Methods for introducing vortical hot tower heating in idealized models

In this paper, we examine techniques for addressing the role of asymmetric perturbations to balanced, tropical cyclone (TC) vortices with the goal of understanding TC intensity change. Most previous studies have used prescribed, time invariant heating to represent deep convection in numerical models. In order to explore a differing view, we consider the question: what is the best way to characterize the heating variability (both spatially and temporally) of deep, rotating convection or vortical hot towers (VHTs) in a numerical model using high-resolution airborne radar observations?

To this end, we investigate methods of retrieving remotely sensed observations of heating within VHTs that will be used to initialize and maintain a future numerical simulation by the authors. Areas that will be explored include: (1) comparing latent heat retrievals from the NASA EDOP and NOAA WP-3D airborne radar platforms and (2) analyzing the time evolving structure of VHT heating from output of a high-resolution, full-physics numerical simulation of Hurricane Bonnie (1998; Braun et al. 2006).