Precipitation Analysis During Hurricane Landfall Situations Using NARR and UPD Data

Hurricane is the most severe kind of the tropical cyclones. Its maximum sustained surface wind, which is one-minute mean, can be equal to or exceed 64 knots or 74 mph. Hurricane can cause much more severe damage through heavy rainfall, which is a serious threat to people's life and property. Precipitation brought by hurricane can result in devastating impact on people's livelihood, agriculture, economy, etc. Therefore, research on rainfall characteristic is of great importance to benefit the society. This research studied the statistic and spatial characteristics of precipitation in NARR and UPD datasets during 2004 and 2005 Atlantic hurricane seasons. ArcGIS software is mainly used during the whole research process.

The result showed that the maximum, mean and standard deviation of precipitation from UPD are all high than those from NARR in 11 hurricane landfall examples in 2004 and 2005. Second, regarding to ratio of precipitation difference between [-25mm, 25mm], 4 out of 11 are about 90%, 5 out of 11 are about 70%, while the lowest is only 38% for Wilma. Finally, UPD do pretty well in both short term and long term spatial analysis. NARR seems better for the short term spatial analysis compared with long term spatial analysis.