Numerical Study of Reintensification of a Tropical Cyclone over Land

Abstract:

Numerical simulations were conducted to investigate the reintensification of a tropical cyclone formed to the north coast of the Northern Territory of Australia in January 2006 (NT2006) with axisymmetric view. The calculations were made using the numerical model (MM5) of Pennsylvania State University/National Center for Atmospheric Research. The results show that the mergers of ‘vortical hot towers’ are nonaxisymmetric due to the high asymmetry of NT2006, which leads to the failure of Hendricks’ ‘vortical hot towers’ mechanism to illuminate the reintensifying process over land. Therefore, the azimuthally averaged absolute angular momentum surfaces were analyzed to prove that the mechanism of the radial convergence of the absolute angular momentum proposed by Smith et al. (2009) can successfully explain the reintensification and spin down of NT2006 over land.