Investigation of the structure and intensity of tropical cyclones using infrared and microwave imagery

Tropical cyclones occur in multiple ocean basins around the world, posing hazards to life and property, yet regular aircraft reconnaissance of these storms is restricted to the North Atlantic. As a result, evaluation of tropical cyclone structure and intensity are limited to techniques such as the Dvorak technique that use remotely-sensed data from satellite-based instruments to estimate these parameters.

The Hurricane Satellite (HURSAT) dataset, which provides 30 years of 3-hourly storm-centered infrared imagery as well as storm-centered microwave observations for the period 1987-2009, is utilized in this study to investigate the structure and intensity of tropical cyclones in the context of the Deviation Angle Variance (DAV) technique. The advantages of using this combined dataset are that microphysical structures that cannot be observed in the infrared imagery are revealed in the MW imagery. We will investigate the structure and intensity of tropical cyclones using this multi-variate dataset and show how the DAV technique for intensity and structure estimation of tropical cyclones might be improved.