The Role of Air-Sea Interactions in the Intensity Change of Sheared Tropical Cyclones Utilizing a Dataset of Co-located Aircraft Expendable Bathythermographs and Dropsondes

Wind shear is generally thought of as having a negative influence upon tropical cyclones (TC). TCs experiencing deep layer (850-200mb) moderate shear (8.7kt - 21.4kt) during their development remain inherently difficult to predict for intensity change. Wind shear influences TC intensity by tilting the TC vortex and allowing detrimental ventilation of the inner core by introducing lower equivalent potential temperature (θ_e) into the mid and low levels. The ocean acts as a source of latent and sensible heat that aids in the recovery of low θ_e boundary layer air that is then entrained into the inner core. Favorable oceanic conditions such as relatively higher sea-surface temperatures (SST) are generally present in the front storm-relative motion quadrants due to the TC not having yet moved over these waters and vertically mixing the water column. We hypothesize that there must exist an ideal overlap of shear-relative and motion-relative storm quadrants in which the shear-induced thermodynamic weakening will be minimized because of the ability of a favorable ocean environment to lead to more efficient boundary layer recovery. We present a novel dataset of co-located aircraft expendable bathythermograph (AXBT) and atmospheric dropwindsonde (dropsonde) soundings from the TROPIC and TC-DROPS datasets, a statistical evaluation of the dataset to find air-sea correlations, and analyses to identify the physical reasonings behind these findings.