1. Jonathan L. Vigh National Center for Atmospheric Research 2:35 PM Thursday May 16, 2013 Fort Collins, CO Joint CSU/NOAA/NCAR Hurricane Workshop Funded by the DTC Visitor Program (FY2012): Development of an HWRF Diagnostics Module to Evaluate Intensity and Structure Using Synthetic Flight Paths Through Tropical Cyclones Collaborators: Eric Uhlhorn, Neal Dorst, Frank Marks, Hugh WIlloughby, Ligia Bernardet, Vijay Tallapragada, Chanh Kieu

2.  The goal of this project is to make an apples- to-apples comparison between the simulated vortex structure in HWRF and direct in situ and remote sensing observations from aircraft. Figure 6 from Uhlhorn and Nolan (2011)

3.  The resulting traces of surface and flight level wind speed in time, obtained by sampling the model storm along the flight paths shown to the left. Figure 8 from Uhlhorn and Nolan (2011)

4.  Primary objectives:  Structure of the wind field at flight level  Structure of the wind field at the surface  Additional evaluations are also possible:  Extrapolated sea level pressure  Flight level temperature  Other kinematic and thermodynamic parameters (e.g. vorticity, theta-E, etc.)

5.  Construct a library of all storms (2010 – 2012) that were observed by aircraft.  Both NOAA and Air Force Reserve  Develop technique to construct synthetic profiles through simulated storms along the observed flight paths  transform earth-relative observational data to frame moving with the storm center  navigate resulting flight pattern in storm-relative coordinates to the moving center of the simulated storm  sample through simulated storm along flight pattern  smooth resulting wind profile to the effective resolution of the 3-km HWRF  Evaluate model’s wind profiles with respect to the observed profiles  -> Diagnose model errors with goal of improving model

6.  Willoughby-Rahn flight level dataset (1977-2001)  Since ~1995-2001 the following have become prevalent  Microwave satellite data (~1998 – present)  GPS dropwindsondes (~1998 onward)  CIRA GOES IR satellite archive (1995-present)  SFMR (2005-present)  QuikSCAT (1999-2009)  Would be great to have the aircraft data readily available for the great storms of 2004/2005/2007.

7.  Data issues  HRD raw flight level data come in variety of formats  Several USAFR ASCII formats (1-minute, 30-second, 10-sec, 1-sec)  Older data at 1-minute time resolution (prior to 1999 or so) on HRD web site – have to ask to get higher time resolution if available  standard tape format (binary) – used until about 2006/2007  NOAA ASCII listings (1-sec and 10-sec)  Newer NOAA data in netCDF format with its own share of problems (no vetting of variables, variable names change from year to year and file to file – situation has improved since standardization efforts by AOC; major changes in 2011)  Raw flight level data are in earth-relative coordinates (Lat/Lon)  NOT translated to moving storm center  Winds not decomposed into tangential and radial components  No separation of “useful” radial legs from all the other stuff  Data issues  HRD raw flight level data come in variety of formats  Several USAFR ASCII formats (1-minute, 30-second, 10-sec, 1-sec)  Older data at 1-minute time resolution (prior to 1999 or so) on HRD web site – have to ask to get higher time resolution if available  standard tape format (binary) – used until about 2006/2007  NOAA ASCII listings (1-sec and 10-sec)  Newer NOAA data in netCDF format with its own share of problems (no vetting of variables, variable names change from year to year and file to file – situation has improved since standardization efforts by AOC; major changes in 2011)  Raw flight level data are in earth-relative coordinates (Lat/Lon)  NOT translated to moving storm center  Winds not decomposed into tangential and radial components  No separation of “useful” radial legs from all the other stuff

8.  Raw flight level data used to calculate dynamic center of storm – a track is produced and fit to these center using Ooyama’s beta splines  Willoughby, H.E., and M. B. Chelmow, 1982, "Objective determination of hurricane tracks from aircraft observations", Mon. Wea. Rev., 110, p.1298-1305.  Neal Dorst (HRD) generates these tracks.  Winds are translated to the moving storm center, decomposed into radial and tangential components

9. Willoughby and Chelmow 1982

10.  The flight level data were parsed by hand into the “good” radial legs - other portions of flight discarded  Data are put into 300 overlapping radial bins using a linear distance weighting (Bartlett window). Weighting decreases linearly from 1.0 at the nominal bin radius to 0.0 at plus or minus the half bin width (DR).  Typical half bin width of 1.0 km with bins 0.5 km apart, so each data point is represented in 4 bins. Typical profiles go out to 150 km.  Legacy format is “ASCII ProFile” with accompanying metadata listed in a variety of other little ASCII files which serve as indices for navigating the data by flight and leg.

11.  While these issues are not intractable, they present a high barrier to anyone who’d like to use the flight level data  To use a substantial amount of flight level data would require mastering the various not-so-nice raw data formats – not trivial  Getting data for many storms (for compositing, data assimilation studies, or research on wind profiles) requires an overwhelming data request to HRD – something they haven’t had the man-power for in the past (this aspect has improved since 2008)  Wind center finding too technical for the casual data user  Future users could be spared this major chore – hopefully spur much more usage of the flight level dataset  Solution – an (overly?) ambitious graduate student with a pressing need and a hankering for large coding projects + one gigantic Cloud Physics class project

13.  Extend the dataset to 1999-current storms  Challenge – design an automated algorithm to parse the radial profiles so that is no longer has to be done by hand  Initially preserve the methodology and functionality of the Willoughby-Rahn dataset (including the legacy output format – uggh!)  Eventually reprocess all storms (1977-current) with consistent methodology and improved output format  This will be version 1.1

14.  Coding accomplished with NCAR Command Language (NCL)  Free, supported, open source  Improved, standardized time coordinate  Data processing and visualization tasks unified  Codes to read, manipulate, and plot dataset can be provided to dataset users  Extended dataset uses netCDF output format  Readable by Matlab, IDL, NCL, etc.  All metadata included in same file (no need for separate ASCII index files)  Flexible data structure – no rigid file formats

15.  Several levels of data processing:  Level 0 – “native” raw data files (ASCII, non-QC’d netCDF, standard tape format) for each flight  Level 1 – raw flight level data converted into a common netCDF format for the entire era (individual files by flight, one big file for each storm) – a format useful for data assimilation!  Level 2 – ALL processed flight level data translated to the moving storm center (netCDF)  Level 3 – Processed flight level data parsed into “good” radial legs (netCDF)

24.  Dusted off the 6000-line code and brought up to modern NCL standards  Readers written for all AFRES data formats since 2005:  ARWO Software Version 15.400.21.4 (circa 2005)  ARWO Software Version 15.400.21.7 (circa 2006)  ARWO Software Version 15.400.22.2 (circa 2007 - 2008)  ARWO Software Version 15.400.23.0 (circa 2008 - used for WPAC)  ARWO Software Version 15.400.24.0 (circa 2009)  ARWO Software Version 15.400.25.0 (circa 2010-2011)  ARWO Software Version 16.0.1.3 (circa 2012)  Robust, flexible reader written for AOC data formats:  2010  2011  2012  Data processed into Level 1 common NetCDF file for each storm during 2010-2012  New earth-relative plotter developed for visual QC  Code set now exceeds 10,000 lines

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39.  Improved center-finding method (??)  Willoughby/Chelmow method is useful, but performance suffers from cases of strong eye convection, eye mesovortices  Improved radial binning method  Narrower frequency response  More consistent data structure  Don’t allow variable bin widths  Do allow radial legs longer than 150 km  Possibility of including SFMR  Could include aerosonde and other mobile platforms  Add dropsondes