On Monday, February 27, Dr. Kosuke Ito from the National Taiwan University visited UMD and presented his work on Tropical Cyclones at our regular Weather-Chaos meeting. He also visited NCEP and gave the EMC seminar on February 28.
His research focused on including surface exchange coefficients Cd/Ck in the control variables of 4-dimensional variational data assimilation. In this way, he could estimate these crucial model parameters for Tropical Cyclone evolution, and improved Tropical Cyclone analyses both in an idealized experiment and in a real Typhoon case. Estimating key model parameters is one of the frontier research topics, and it was very interesting to see his pioneering work.