Large Eddy Simulations of Hurricane Intensification

We present idealized numerical simulations of the hurricane intensification process at a grid spacing of 60 meters that covers a large region of the hurricane inner-core. While the initial, balanced vortex and properties of the environment (e.g. dry, no shear) are idealized, the simulations are driven by latent heating calculated from airborne Doppler radar observations in rapidly intensifying Hurricane Guillermo (1997). Diagnostics from the simulations will be presented including initial efforts to understand fundamental questions on the role of asymmetries in the intensification process in a regime characterized by a wide range of energetic length scales. In addition, we will present studies that use the simulated data to understand the sampling characteristics of airborne Doppler radars and algorithms used to compute the three-dimensional and ocean surface wind field.