A New Typhoon-Monitoring Method Using Precipitation Water Vapor

Some seasonal natural floods can be attributed to typhoons that bring a large amount of atmospheric water vapor, and variations in atmospheric water vapor can be reflected in the precipitable water vapor (PWV). Therefore, monitoring typhoons based on the anomalous variations of the PWV is the focus of this paper. The anomalous variations of ERA5(fifth-generation reanalysis dataset of the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasting)-derived PWV with other atmospheric parameters related to typhoons, such as precipitation, pressure, and wind, were first analyzed during typhoon periods. After that, a typhoon-monitoring method with and without considering the typhoon’s acceleration was proposed according to the time of the maximum value of the PWV during the typhoon period in this paper. Corresponding experiments based on the measured and simulated data were performed to evaluate the proposed method. The experimental measurement of Typhoon Hato revealed that the velocity of the typhoon’s movement estimated by the proposed method was close to the observed value, and the maximum difference between the estimated and observed values was less than 3 km/h. A simulated experiment was also carried out in which the acceleration of the typhoon’s movement was also considered. The simulated results verified the reliability and feasibility of the proposed method. The estimated velocity and acceleration of the typhoon’s movement were almost equal to the true values under the cases of using different numbers of stations and selecting various typhoon locations. Such results obtained above indicate that the method proposed in this paper has a significant potential application value for typhoon monitoring.