Move a Tropical Cyclone with 4D-Var and Vortex Dynamical Initialization in WRF Model

Abstract

Previous studies showed that 4D-Var technique used for data assimilation could be modified for weather control. This study demonstrates the ability of 4D-Var to influence the future path of a tropical cyclone by calculating perturbations in WRF simulation. Given the background error covariance matrix, the initial field is improved by the vortex dynamic initialization technique. Our results show that 4D-Var can be applied to control the trajectory of simulated tropical cyclones by producing "optimal" perturbations. In the numerical simulation experiment of Typhoon Mitag in 2019, after this kind of weather control similar to data assimilation, the tropical cyclone moved obviously, and the damaging wind over the coastline weakened. The prediction results after the initial field modified by 4D-Var have a great change, and the position of the tropical cyclone moved about 0.5° southeastward after assimilation, which misses the southeast coast of China. Moreover, the damaging wind is also weakened. Since the 4D-Var is premised on the assumption that the model is perfect and does not consider the model error, then the research plan to consider model error and introduce new methods is discussed in the paper.