Andrew Hickok, “Towards an Updated Climatology of Overland Tropical Cyclone Maintenance and Intensification Events”
Mentor: Clark Evans, Atmospheric Sciences
Poster #80

This study presents preliminary findings from a climatology of overland tropical cyclone intensification and maintenance. This climatology updates the prior climatology of Andersen and Shepherd (2014, Int. J. Climatol.) using a longer period of record and state-of-the-art atmospheric and land-surface reanalysis datasets. As in the Andersen and Shepherd (2014) climatology, this climatology uses global IBTrACS (International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship) data to determine candidate cyclones, except with the climatology’s ending year extended forward from 2008 to 2021 to increase the number of candidate cyclones. Candidate cyclones are required to maintain or increase their maximum sustained 10-m wind speed for at least one 6-h period while inland by at least 300 km and in a non- or weakly baroclinic synoptic-scale environment (small horizontal temperature differences and a weak change in wind speed with height) to be identified as overland maintenance or intensification events. To date, 64 candidate cyclones have been identified out of the 4696 cyclones in the full dataset. This climatology is being used to document basic best-track properties for each cyclone (e.g., location, time of year) and reanalysis-derived land-surface properties that control surface enthalpy fluxes such as soil type, soil moisture, and soil temperature. The climatology will be used to evaluate how soil properties differ for overland maintenance and intensification events relative to overland decay events. This will allow for a determination of whether the data distributions are identical between maintenance/intensification events and decay events, which in turn will provide valuable insights toward the physical processes at play in these unique events.