Are Special Processes at Work in the Rapid Intensification of Tropical Cyclones?

Probably not. Frequency distributions of intensification and dissipation developed from synthetic open-ocean tropical cyclone data show no evidence of significant departures from exponential distributions, though there is some evidence for a fat tail of dissipation rates. This suggests that no speci...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kowch, Roman, Emanuel, Kerry Andrew
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: American Meteorological Society 2015
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/98391
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2066-2082
Description
Summary:Probably not. Frequency distributions of intensification and dissipation developed from synthetic open-ocean tropical cyclone data show no evidence of significant departures from exponential distributions, though there is some evidence for a fat tail of dissipation rates. This suggests that no special factors govern high intensification rates and that tropical cyclone intensification and dissipation are controlled by statistically random environmental and internal variability.