[Canceled] Seminar "Using imaginary worlds to understand tropical cyclones on Earth" by Prof. Dan Chavas

[Speaker]

Prof. Dan Chavas

Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences

Purdue University

[Abstract]

This talk will discuss the use of planetary climate simulation experiments to understand fundamental aspects of tropical cyclones on Earth. Existing hypotheses for latitudinal dependencies of key tropical cyclone characteristics, including genesis rate, minimum genesis latitude, and storm size, depend principally on the local value of the Coriolis parameter. We test these hypotheses via dynamical aquaplanet experiments with uniform thermal forcing in which planetary rotation rate and planetary radius are varied relative to Earth values. We propose a novel theoretical explanation for dynamical controls of the qualitative state of the system that invokes the interplay of the two intrinsic length-scales in the system. We show that this theory successfully links the dynamics of the sphere to existing “tropical cyclone world” simulations on an f-plane. Finally, we further compare aquaplanet results against a present-day Earth simulation in order to connect basic theory to the real Earth.