A relocation-based initialization scheme to improve track-forecasting of tropical cyclones

A relocation procedure to initialize tropical cyclones was developed to improve the representation of the initial conditions and the track forecast for Panasonic Weather Solutions Tropical Operational Forecasts. This scheme separates the vortex perturbation and environment field from the first guess, then relocates the initial vortex perturbations to the observed position by merging them with the environment field. The relationships of wind vector components with stream function and velocity potential are used for separating the vortex disturbance from first guess. For the separation of scalars, a low-pass Barnes filter is employed. The irregular-shaped relocation area corresponding to the specific initial conditions is determined by mapping the edge of the vortex radius in 36 directions. Then, the non-vortex perturbations in the relocation area are removed by a two-pass Barnes filter to retain the vortex perturbations, while the variable fields outside the perimeter of the modified vortex are kept identical to the original first guess. The potential impacts of this scheme on track forecasts were examined for three hurricane cases in the 2011-12 hurricane season. The experimental results demonstrate that the initialization scheme is able to effectively separate the vortex field from the environment field and maintain a relatively balanced and accurate relocated first guess. As the initial track error is reduced, the following track forecasts are considerably improved. The 72-h average track forecast error was reduced by 32.6% for the cold-start cases, and by 38.4% when using the full-cycling data assimilation because of the accumulated improvements from the initialization scheme.