Premium
On the size distribution of Atlantic tropical cyclones
Author(s) -
Dean L.,
Emanuel K. A.,
Chavas D. R.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2009gl039051
Subject(s) - tropical cyclone , storm , climatology , tropical cyclogenesis , tropical cyclone rainfall forecasting , atlantic hurricane , tropical cyclone scales , radius , environmental science , metric (unit) , cyclone (programming language) , atmospheric sciences , geology , oceanography , operations management , computer security , field programmable gate array , computer science , computer hardware , economics
The size of a tropical cyclone is known to vary considerably across storms, though little is understood about the environmental and internal factors that modulate it. Making use of newly available extended tropical cyclone records that include information about storm structure, we examine the size distribution of Atlantic tropical cyclones, using as a metric the radius of vanishing storm winds normalized by the theoretical upper bound given by the ratio of the potential intensity to the Coriolis parameter. We find that the distribution of this normalized outer radius is closely log‐normal.