National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The intense tropical cyclone, Hagibis, rapidly intensified in the western Pacific Ocean reaching super typhoon status on 07 October 2019. The Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) model currently running in real-time at 12km horizontal resolution with 72 vertical levels assimilating global observations to produce initial states and forecasts of global weather is able to capture much of the large-scale features of intense storms like Hagibis.

An experimental version of GEOS running with nearly 8× as many grid volumes at 6km horizontal resolution with 132 vertical levels and including non-hydrostatic dynamical effects, advanced convection, and cloud physics processes provides an improved representation of the mesoscale features of Hagibis.

Caption: The inset image in this frame is a satellite image from the NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP satellite [Credit: NASA Worldview, Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS)] which passed over Super Typhoon Hagibis on 10 October at 06:00Z. The larger image is a visible cloud image from the experimental GEOS 6km 132-level model 54 hours into the model forecast. Hagibis has a well-defined eye, filled with shallow, low level clouds surrounded by deep convective bands and long stream of clouds being draw into an extratropical frontal system to the northeast.

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The animation below shows the predicted cloud fields (displayed as infrared longwave simulated brightness temperatures) from GEOS-FP (12km 72L, left) compared with the experimental GEOS model (6km 132L, right). Throughout the animation, the improved physical representation of typhoon Hagibis can be seen from the better defined eye and the enhanced cloud properties within the bands of convection extending through the outflow of the typhoon.

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