THE BEHAVIOR OF A SIMPLE HURRICANE MODEL USING A CONVECTIVE SCHEME BASED ON SUBCLOUD LAYER ENTROPY EQUILIBRIUM

Kerry Emanuel
Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA

Abstract

Recent work on the interaction of convection with large-scale flows suggests that a closure based on a presumed equilibrium between surface enthalpy fluxes and input of low-entropy air into the subcloud layer by convective downdrafts works well in models of the tropical atmosphere. Such a convective representation is here used in a simple numerical tropical cyclone model. This further simplifies the model while in many respects improving its performance.

• Introduction
• Hurricane model
• Results
• Summary
• Appendix
• References
• Table 1
• Table 2
• Figure captions
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