Open AccessHurricane Imaging Radiometer (HIRAD) Wind Speed Retrievals and Validation Using Dropsondes
Author(s) -
Daniel J. Cecil,
Moanaro Biswas
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
journal of atmospheric and oceanic technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.774
H-Index - 124
eISSN - 1520-0426
pISSN - 0739-0572
DOI - 10.1175/jtech-d-17-0031.1
Subject(s) - tropical cyclone , dropsonde , wind speed , environmental science , storm , maximum sustained wind , radiometer , tropical cyclogenesis , meteorology , atmospheric sciences , climatology , remote sensing , wind direction , cyclone (programming language) , geology , wind gradient , physics , field programmable gate array , computer science , computer hardware
Surface wind speed retrievals have been generated and evaluated using Hurricane Imaging Radiometer (HIRAD) measurements from flights over Hurricane Joaquin, Hurricane Patricia, Hurricane Marty, and the remnants of Tropical Storm Erika—all in 2015. Procedures are described here for producing maps of brightness temperature, which are subsequently used for retrievals of surface wind speed and rain rate across a ~50-km-wide swath for each flight leg. An iterative retrieval approach has been developed to take advantage of HIRAD’s measurement characteristics. Validation of the wind speed retrievals has been conducted, using 636 dropsondes released from the same WB-57 high-altitude aircraft carrying HIRAD during the Tropical Cyclone Intensity (TCI) experiment. The HIRAD wind speed retrievals exhibit very small bias relative to the dropsondes, for winds of tropical storm strength (17.5 m s −1 ) or greater. HIRAD has reduced sensitivity to winds weaker than tropical storm strength and a small positive bias (~2 m s −1 ). Two flights with predominantly weak winds according to the dropsondes have abnormally large errors from HIRAD and large positive biases. From the other flights, the root-mean-square differences between HIRAD and the dropsonde winds are 4.1 m s −1 (33%) for winds below tropical storm strength, 5.6 m s −1 (25%) for tropical storm–strength winds, and 6.3 m s −1 (16%) for hurricane-strength winds. The mean absolute differences for those three categories are 3.2 m s −1 (25%), 4.3 m s −1 (19%), and 4.8 m s −1 (12%), respectively, with a bias near zero for winds of tropical storm and hurricane strength.