← Search

Data · dataset · 2026

A climatology of hurricane eye formation

Listed in National Center for Atmospheric Research

This paper presents a climatology of the initial eye formations of a broad set of Atlantic tropical cyclones (TCs) during 1989 - 2008.

Description

A new dataset of structure and intensity parameters is synthesized from the vortex data messages transmitted by routine aircraft reconnaissance. Using these data together with satellite imagery and other established datasets, the times when each TC achieved various stages of eye development are tabulated to form the basis of the climatology.

About 60% of Atlantic TCs form eyes. Most often, aircraft observe the eye structure before it appears in IR satellite imagery. Eyes tend to form in high potential intensity environments characterized by high sea surface temperatures and low-to-moderate environmental vertical wind shear.

Read the rest (1 more)

A notable discovery is that most (67%) TCs that form eyes tend to do so within 48 h of the cyclone's reaching tropical storm strength. This suggests the existence of an opportune time window during which a TC can readily form an eye. From the lengths of time taken to reach various stages of eye development, the characteristic time scale for eye formation is estimated to be about 36 h.

Links

Get the data

Where it is published

Catalogue records · 1

Topics

Inferred from text
Satellite remote sensing 65%
Provenance · 1 source records, 8 field assertions
SourceKeyLast seenRaw
National Center for Atmospheric Research8218ad0f-c9e6-4409-a544-796e2c4a8bd312 d agoJSON v1
FieldAssertionExtractorEvidence
concepts[field].local:field:earth-environmentalmapping · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
concepts[field].local:field:ocean-atmosphericmapping · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
concepts[modality].local:modality:remote-sensingenrichment · data ucar edukeyword-concept-rules@1.0.0title+description (65%)
created_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
descriptionsource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0/notes
publication_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
titlesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0/title
updated_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0