DeMaria, Zehr, Hilgendorf, Knaff, Vaughn, Connell

• Research continues on environmental vertical wind shear influences on hurricane intensity change.  An outline of a paper for journal article submission was completed.  A paper entitled, "Improving the Quantitative Assessment of Vertical Wind Shear on Tropical Cyclone Intensity Change," by  R. Zehr was submitted to the 23rd conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology.  It will be given as an oral presentation, January 11 at the AMS Conference in Dallas, TX.

• Advanced Microwave Sounder Unit (AMSU) data along with comparative data is being analyzed in a joint project with Stan Kidder (CIRA) and Mitch Goldberg (NESDIS ORA).  AMSU passes from Hurricanes Bonnie, Georges, and Mitch, and Super typhoon Zeb have been collected along with GOES imagery and coinciding intensity and surface wind information. AMSU 89 and 150 Ghz images have been analyzed and vertical cross section of soundings in a temperature anomaly format were generated. A rough outline and plan for an initial journal article on this work has been discussed.

• Research on tropical cyclone intensity forecasting is continuing.  A paper entitled "Incorporation of Aircraft Observations in a Statistical Hurricane Intensity Prediction Scheme" has been accepted for oral presentation at the AMS Conference in Dallas, TX in January 1999.  Water vapor imagery and GOES sounder products from the 1997 and 1998 hurricane seasons are being prepared for a study of tropical cyclone genesis.

• A new project is underway with CIRA support to get all available tropical cyclone geostationary (excluding SRSO) IR imagery into a common format on CD-ROM to improve data processing for applications testing and technique development purposes. Many studies are often not completed due to inefficient access to large data samples on tape storage.  This data set will alleviate that problem. The data set is from a combination of Tropical RAMSDIS and CIRA archives, and include tropical cyclones in the Pacific, and Atlantic from GMS and Meteosat imagery as well as GOES.  As of December 14, the initial version of the archive contains more than 5000 images with 35 tropical cyclones, (22 in the Atlantic region, from 1995-1998).

• Research continues with the use of SRSO (1-min) data sets. The overall objectives are: 1) to improve understanding of tropical cyclone intensity and structure change, and 2) to develop satellite products and techniques for tropical cyclone forecasting. Observational analysis includes 1-min GOES-9 (at 90W) images archived at CIRA, 10-sec "Hurricane Hunter" aircraft observations, (obtained from NOAA HRD), and high density satellite wind sets (obtained from CIMSS).  Kelly Findeisen (CSU) has completed detailed upper level wind analyses from two consecutive days of Hurricane Marilyn (1995) and is working on the third day's data set. John Knaff is working with aircraft and 1-min satellite data from Hurricane Luis (1995).

• R. Zehr contributed to a chapter in of a report on WMO Sub-Project No. 19 "Estimating the Amount of Precipitation Associated with Tropical Cyclones Using Satellite Data", Professor Eric Barrett, Chief Editor.  The report is in the form of a book on satellite applications for tropical cyclone analysis.  Ray is a co-author with Mohan Karayampudi (NASA) of Chapter 2 called "Tropical Cyclone Structure and Dynamics."

• Data for the 1998 Atlantic/ Pacific Tropical Cyclone Season:  A fairly detailed tropical cyclone data set was constructed for the 1998 summer months.  Beginning in mid August, data include high density winds from the University of Wisconsin, European Research Satellite Scatterometer derived surface winds, and half-hour GOES/ Meteosat/ GMS IR images remapped to a Mercator Projection for 19 selected hurricanes.

• Hurricane animation from GOES was provided to University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) Communications, in Boulder CO.  They were provided GOES images of Hurricanes Luis, Bonnie, and Georges from the CIRA archive to record high quality videos of the satellite loops. They used it for educational material in Vol. 4 of Climate Stock entitled Hurricane Weather Events.

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