Evolution of hurricane Alberto (2000) in the Field of Water Vapor over North Atlantic Retrieved from Satellite Data
Ermakov, D.M.¹; Sharkov, E.A.^2
1Institute of Radioengineering and Electronics of RAS, RUSSIAN FEDERATION; ²Space Research Institute of RAS, RUSSIAN FEDERATION

The hurricanes or tropical cyclones (TC) of the Northern Atlantic often demonstrate extremely complicated and unpredictable behavior which to a certain extent can be explained by the features of the Atlantic basin: its relative narrowness in the longitudinal direction, active interaction with polar regions, and the resulting picture of winds and currents. While some of the North Atlantic hurricanes reach the mature phase and hit the US coast with dramatic consequences to population and infrastructure, others experience intensity oscillations and drift by irregular trajectory to the higher latitudes where they finally disintegrate affecting the weather and climate of Europe in two respects: by transport of warm and wet tropical air and by generating new structures (mid-latitude cyclones etc) through the interaction with polar air masses.

A characteristic example of the latter scenario is the evolution of hurricane Alberto, which took place in August, 2000. Alberto had three periods of intensification and dissipation while drifting first in the north-west direction to the US coast, then in the east direction to the Azores and then after some trajectory perturbations - to the north-east, to be finally dissolved and integrated into a mid-latitude cyclone, originated near the Western Europe due to the interaction of subtropical and arctic air masses.

To thoroughly investigate the hurricane Alberto's evolution the authors combined the TC's trajectory and kinematics data from the ''GLOBAL-TC'' database of the Space Research Institute (Russia) with the detailed animated field of atmospheric total precipitable water (TPW) constructed from microwave satellite data by the original authors' algorithm. The joint data processing shows that the large-scale features of the TPW field correlate with the periods of Alberto's intensification and dissipation and are one of the key elements to analyze and explain its evolutionary behavior throughout its life time (4 - 23 August, 2000).

The report contains a brief outline of the authors approach to construct detailed animated TPW fields and the results of the joint data processing including the demonstration of the animated TPW field over the Northern Atlantic (spatial resolution of 0.2°, temporal resolution of 1.5 hours, and interval of observations from 3 August through 24 August, 2000) merged with the correspondent data from ''GLOBAL-TC'' database.