Spiral rainband in a numerically simulated tropical cyclone

Spiral rainband is a prominent structure of tropical cyclone. Though its forming mechanism, vortex Rossby wave theory, has been widely accepted in recent years,its internal structural features are still not well known. The spiral rainband in the severe tropical storm Kammuri (2002),which caused heavy rainfall in southeast China, is simulated using the mesoscale model MM5 (V3). Results show that the simulated spiral rainband propagates azimuthally at a speed close to that of vortex Rossby wave in theory, and is accompanied with energy dispersion in the radial direction. The structural features of simulated spiral rainband are analyzed with the high-resolution model output including the full physical process. Positive vorticity, ascending motion, horizontal momentum and so on are highly concentrated in the spiral rainband. The convergent moisture of spiral rainband comes mostly from the planetary boundary layer under 1 km.Airflow from the outside of spiral rainband is convective instability, which can provide instability energy for convection development. However, the atmospheric stratification in the inside of spiral rainband is neutral, implying that the instability energy has been released. There is a mesoscale strong wind band just near the spiral rainband in the outer side with a maximum wind speed exceeding 30 m/s, which results from the pressure force acceleration when the air flows into the spiral rainband along the gradient of pressure.     

Features of the EAP events on the medium-range evolution process and the mid- and high-latitude Rossby wave activities during the Meiyu period

In this paper, features for the evolution of the East Asia/Pacific （EAP） events and their association with high- and mid-latitude Rossby waves during the Meiyu period are analyzed on the medium-range time scale, it is shown that life cycles of the positive and negative EAP events cannot be simply regarded as ＂mirror＂ each other. In the upper troposphere, downward propagations of Rossby wave packets both over high- and mid-latitude regions of Eurasian continent and over the Asian jet region are responsible for generating basic patterns of high- and mid-latitude anomaly centers of the events. In this layer, Rossby wave packets also propagate from the mid-latitude anomaly center to the high-latitude one. In the middle and lower troposphere, the formation of the subtropical anomaly center of the event is mainly attributed to the anomalous convective activity in the tropical Pacific warm pool. The northward Rossby wave energy dispersion from this center is favorable to the enhancement and maintenance of the mid-latitude anomaly center in the same layer. Finally, it might be hypothesized that typical features of the positive and negative EAP events in their mature phase result from the interaction between （or phase-locking of） respective anomalous circulations induced both by quasi-zonal Rossby wave packets embedded in upper troposphere westerly and by quasi-meridional Rossby wave packets in the background flow of the East Asian summer monsoon in the middle and lower troposphere.