Numerical modeling of intense tropical cyclone Dina (2002) in the South West Indian Ocean using Meso-Nh model

Dina was born on the 16th of January 2002 in the South West Indian Ocean. It became an intense tropical cyclone the 20th, and affected directly Mauritius and La Reunion islands on the 22nd by causing lots of material damages estimated in hundred millions of euros. The Météo-France Doppler radar in La Reunion (55.5°E, 20.8°S) made observations while the storm passed near the island, providing reflectivity and velocity data within 400 and 150 km range, respectively. The analysis of these data has revealed the kinematic structure of the storm and the possible influence of the orography on its structure and its track (Roux et al. 2004).

In this work, the French non-hydrostatic mesoscale numerical model Meso-Nh has been run at very high resolution to simulate Dina through an initialization with the large-scale analysis (ECMWF) and a bogus vortex derived from the Doppler radar observations, using the technique developed by Nuissier et al. (2005). The results concerning the structure and propagation of the simulated storm, and the influence of the island orography on the eyewall, obtained with four nested domains at 36, 12, 4 and 1-km horizontal resolution will be presented.