1. August- September NSF NOAA NRL NCAR UW UM 27th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology, Monterey, CA, 27 April 2006

2. Shuyi ChenR. Houze Wen-Chau LeeJim Moore

3. KatrinaOpheliaRita Hurricanes investigated in RAINEX

4. Motivation for RAINEX Understanding Rapid Intensity Changes

6. Cat 2 Cat 3 Cat 5 Cat 4 Day 12435 Famous Rapidly Intensifing Storm Hurricane Opal (1995) Pressure drop How do interactions of eyewalls & rainbands in the mature storm… … lead to intensity changes like these? rainband Intensity change problem:

7. RAINEX Flight Coordination ELDORA radar

8. Plan--target dropsondes and Doppler

10. Katrina

11. Katrina-28 August NRL convective upwind stratiform downwind Atlas et al. ‘ 63

12. Katrina-28 August ELDORA data Ref Vel Barnes et al. ‘ 83 NRL

13. Katrina-28 August Confirms “ Barnes ” structure

14. Rita

15. RAINEX Flights in Hurricane Rita

16. Rita- 21 September Intensifying to Cat. 5

17. 0 ºC Rita- 21 September Intensifying to Cat. 5

18. Dropsondes EyeEyewall Rita- 21 September Intensifying to Cat. 5

19. Rita- 22 September-Concentric Eyewalls

20. ELDORA compositeKossin et al. 2000 vorticity Rita- 22 September-Concentric Eyewalls

21. Dropsonde in the “ moat ” region 1802 UTC 22 September ‘05 Rita- 22 September-Concentric Eyewalls

22. Rita- 23 September-Sheared Shear Rogers et al. ‘ 03

23. Ophelia

24. A B Ophelia-9 September-Dry Midlevel Inflow B A Dry air Ref Vel

25. Data Availability

26. CONCLUSIONS RAINEX Notables: 3 hurricanes—Katrina, Ophelia, & Rita Innovative satellite-based flight control First use of ELDORA in a hurricane Data available via NCAR Field Catalog Katrina and Rita details: K & R’s spiral rainbands had Atlas & Barnes structures R sampled in 3 stages: rapid int., 2nd eyewall, shear Echo cores in eyewalls were linear & oblique Moat region had eye-like sounding Dry air entered in subsiding mesoscale midlevel inflows KatrinaOpheliaRita

27. Thanks