Association of Mesoscale Features With Tropical Cyclone Tauktae

Abstract

An attempt has been made in this paper to examine the ability of various microphysical schemes (Morrison, Thompson, Lin) of Weather Research Forecasting (WRF) model in analyzing the convective features in a cyclone Tauktae over the Arabian Sea from May 14^th to May 19^th, 2021. This study explores the model’s performance of various schemes with MERRA2 observations. For rainfall, India Meteorological Department (IMD) daily rainfall dataset has been considered as observation. In this study, the evaluation of various model parameters has been done using statistical metrics and skill scores. Among the three schemes, Morrison scheme stands out to be most reliable scheme with high correlation and less BIAS and Root Mean Square error (RMSE). The convective parameters used for the study of cyclonic activity are rainfall (RF), cloud top temperature (CTT), lifted index (LI), total precipitable water (TPW), convective available potential energy (CAPE), convective inhibition (CIN), sea level pressure (SLP), sea surface temperature (SST), geo potential height (GPH), Storm Relative Helicity (SRLH), composite reflectivity (COMP_ref) and divergence. CAPE has been a useful parameter in analyzing the cyclone’s energy. The WRF model was found to be useful in forecasting severe convection related cyclonic activity.