Role of barrier layer in the developing phase of “Category 6” super typhoon Haiyan

Abstract

With the remarkable intensity of 170 knots, Typhoon Haiyan starts as a tropical depression on November 3 and develops to the peak as super tropical cyclone (TC) on November 7 in 2013. This intensity makes Haiyan one of the strongest TCs record ever observed and 35 knots higher than the maximum of the existing highest category. Haiyan originated from the eastern part of the Northwest Pacific Warm Pool and moved westward over warm water with a thick barrier layer (BL). The BL reduced the vertical mixing and entrainment caused by Haiyan and prevented the cold thermocline water into the mixed layer (ML). As a result, sea temperature cooling associated with wind stirring was suppressed. Relative high sea surface temperature (SST) kept fueling Haiyan via latent heat flux release, which favored the rapid development of a “Category 6” super typhoon.

Air‐sea fluxes for Hurricane Patricia (2015): Comparison with supertyphoon Haiyan (2013) and under different ENSO conditions

“…Finally, we diagnose the potential differences in preexisting ocean salinity conditions between the two TCs. Salinity has been shown to be influential on TC intensification through the presence of quasi‐permanent salinity‐induced barrier layers in the tropical oceans [ Balaguru et al ., ; Zhang et al , ]. They are defined as the layer between the mixed layer depth and the isothermal layer depth.…”

Editorial

“…Among these papers, five papers investigated atmospheric or oceanographic phenomena and processes using satellite remote sensing data (Doronzo et al , 2017;Han et al, 2016;Pirhalla et al, 2017;Wu et al, 2016). Four papers examined hydrodynamics and regional oceanography based on numerical simulations, in-situ observations, and satellite remote sensing data (Chen et al, 2017;Luo, 2016;Shan et al, 2016;Zhang et al, 2017;). Two papers investigated regional atmospheric conditions based on reanalysis data (Yang et al, 2016;Yang et al, 2017).…”