Understanding the Turbulent Dynamics of Convective Bursts and Tropical Cyclone Intensification Using Large Eddy Simulations and High-Order Numerics

The intensity of hurricanes is a budget between energy production, dissipation, and the nonlinear transfer of that energy across scales. The dissipation of energy primarily occurs in the boundary layer through frictional drag and a hierarchy of turbulent eddies that transfer energy to other scales. Numerical models attempt to calculate this energy balance, but they often introduce significant artificial dissipation due to the design of their solution algorithms. This artificial dissipation can have a large impact on the resolved flow fields that affects the interpretation of features for research and forecasting applications.

The goal of this project is to understand the fluid dynamics of hurricane intensification in community models (e.g., WRF and/or CM1; finite difference methods) where artificial dissipation is typically large and research models (e.g., NUMA and/or NEPTUNE; continuous Galerkin methods) where artificial dissipation is typically negligible. The scientific focus is on understanding the lifecycle of convective bursts and their interaction with the vortex in a turbulent regime using large eddy simulations over the entire inner core. This presentation will highlight recent findings on this topic and present lessons learned on the two classes of numerical models described above.