One of the fundamental requirements to achieve a more accurate prediction, and understanding, of tropical cyclogenesis events is an improved knowledge of the precipitation organization, in the context…

This federal grant award was issued by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to Florida International University (FIU) to conduct research on the relationship between precipitation and environmental forcing during tropical cyclone formation. The goal of the research is to develop a 13-year global database of developing and non-developing tropical disturbances using data from multiple passive microwave satellite sensors. The research aims to identify systematic differences in precipitation properties between developing and non-developing cases and understand how these properties relate to the environmental conditions. This research directly supports the objectives of NASA's Weather Focus Area and Hurricane Science Research Program to improve the prediction of extreme weather events. The grant, valued at $80,969.69, does not have a set-aside designation and runs through March 2018.

One of the fundamental requirements to achieve a more accurate prediction, and understanding, of tropical cyclogenesis events is an improved knowledge of the precipitation organization, in the context of environmental forcing, during the formation process. The goal of research under this proposal is to use data from multiple passive microwave (PMW) satellite sensors, which offer a more reliable representation of the rainfall organization than the more typically used infrared satellite imagery, over multiple years to quantify to what degree precipitation properties, and their relationships with the environmental forcing, are consistent among developing and nondeveloping cases. An improved prediction of tropical cyclogenesis is fundamentally dependent on understanding the array of genesis pathways possible. The foundation of the proposed research is, thus, to develop a comprehensive 13-year global database (2003-2015) of developing and nondeveloping tropical disturbances. The database will consist of precipitation properties derived from PMW brightness temperatures from multiple sensors, including imagers on the NASA tropical rainfall measuring mission (trmm) and global precipitation measurement (GPM) spacecraft, statistics on individual precipitation features (PF) identified using precipitation radars on trmm and GPM, lightning statistics from the trmm lightning imaging sensor (LIS), PMW-derived thermodynamic properties (sea surface temperature, humidity/moisture content, and temperature), as well as environmental properties (e.g., vertical wind shear) quantified using the NASA gmao (global modeling and assimilation office) merra (modern-ERA retrospective analysis for research and applications) reanalysis. Analyses from the dataset will identify whether systematic differences exist between developing and nondeveloping cases for precipitation properties, such as the relative contributions of convective and stratiform rain, the depth (shallow, moderate, and deep) and intensity of convection, as well as the size distribution of individual PFS. Particular attention will be placed on the temporal evolution of these properties, how they relate to the environment in which they are embedded, and quantifying the feedback of precipitation processes on inner core properties; feedbacks include moistening and humidification of the midtroposphere, as well as the progressive development of the characteristic upper-level warm core. The relevance of these results directly address the objectives of the weather focus area of the earth science research program to improve prediction of extreme weather events, particularly using NASA satellite missions, and is a logical extension of the objectives of the NASA hurricane science research program (hsrp) and hurricane and severe storm sentinel (HS3), which are to understand to what extent precipitation processes dictate intensity change versus environmental processes.