Recommended citation: Pérez-Alarcón, A.; Fernández-Alvarez, J.C., Nieto, R.; Gimeno, L. (2022). Overview of moisture sources for the precipitation of tropical cyclones through a Lagrangian approach XXXVIII Reunión Bienal de la Real Sociedad Española de Física . Murcia, 11-15 July 2022. https://www.um.es/fisica/bienal-2022/assets/content/AS6.pdf

Abstact

Tropical cyclones (TCs) not only produce heavy rainfall in tropical latitudes but also in mid-latitudes. In this work, we investigated the moisture sources for the precipitation of TCs in each basin, namely the North Atlantic Ocean (NATL), Central and East Pacific Ocean (NEPAC), Western North Pacific Ocean (WNP), South Pacific Ocean (SPO), North Indian Ocean (NIO) and South Indian Ocean (SIO). To do this, we applied the Lagrangian moisture source diagnostic method and implemented in the TRansport Of water VApor (TROVA) tool to the trajectories of all air parcels that precipitated over the TCs location. The pathways of atmospheric parcels were from the global outputs of the FLEXPART model. Meanwhile, the National Hurricane Center and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center provided the 6-hourly information of all TCs through the best track archives. Our results revealed that the moisture often came from ocean sources. Nevertheless, the Central America and Indian Peninsula terrestrial sources played an important role in supplying moisture for TCs over the NEPAC and NIO basins, respectively. In summary, the contributions from the western NATL, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico accounted for ~91% of moisture in the NATL basin. In NEPAC, the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean and Central America mainland supplied ~92% of total moisture, while the western North Pacific Ocean, the Philippine Sea and the South China Sea contributed ~90% in WNP. The Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Peninsula supported approximately 95% of moisture in the NIO basin. Most of the moisture (~91) that precipitated over the TCs location in the SIO basin was supplied from the tropical Indian Ocean, while the Coral Sea and the western SPO provided substantial moisture (~91%) for the precipitation of TCs in the SPO basin.