In this study, a rapidly east-coastal cyclogenesis event that took place during 3-4 October 1987 is investigated using a nested-grid version of the Penn State/NCAR mesoscale model (MM4) with a fine mesh grid size of 25 km. It is shown that the MM4 model reproduces reasonably well the growth of the cyclone from a coastal frontal zone, its subsequent track, intensity, circulation structures and its associated precipitation. It is found that the coastal cyclogenesis occurs in a favorable large-scale environment with pronounced thermal advection in the lower troposphere and marked potential vorticity (PV) concentration aloft associated with the tropopause depression. The transport of warm and moist air from the marine boundary layer by the low-level inshore flow provides the necessary latent energy for the production of the observed heavy precipitation and a variety of weather phenomena. / A series of 24-h sensitivity simulations are performed to examine the relative importance of diabatic heating, large-scale forcing and the quality of initial conditions in the cyclogenesis. To determine why several model simulations failed in predicting correctly all of the observed scenarios, a dynamical nudging experiment is conducted to provide a "ground-truth" dataset. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.23432 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Creators | Wang, Jianjie |
| Contributors | Zhang, D.-L. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001487281, proquestno: MM12288, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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