Presentation description

Tropical cyclones are among the most impactful natural disasters globally, often resulting in massive devastation through torrential rainfall that causes extensive flooding and high-speed winds that damage infrastructure. With climate change, these powerful storms have been observed to evolve in intensity, frequency, and rainfall distribution, raising new questions about how their behavior is being altered. This research project focused on the changing rainfall trends within tropical cyclones. Previous data collected from satellites showed an increase in rainfall within the tropical cyclones' outer rainbands, but a surprising decrease in rainfall near the storm's inner portion, including in the eyewall. This was unexpected, as rising global temperatures should, theoretically, lead to an overall increase in precipitation due to more moisture availability in warmer air.
Throughout this project, multiple datasets and trends were analyzed to try and find if this decreasing precipitation was a product of climatic factors or if it was rather due to the satellite instrumentation doing the measurements. Previous projects done on this topic used a blended satellite approach, thus our project was based around not taking a blended approach and using a higher spatial resolution satellite to see if we see the same decreasing trend. In other words, we were looking to see if the decreasing trend in inner core rainfall could be due to discontinuities between different satellites. To analyse this, an algorithm of precipitation data, named GPROF, was used to try and mitigate satellite error.