THE APPLICATION OF CONDITIONAL NONLINEAR OPTIMAL PERTURBATION TO THE BINARY TYPHOONS INTERACTION ―FENGSHEN AND FUNG-WONG

The interaction between the typhoons Fengshen and Fung-wong over the Western Pacific in 2002 is studied with the Conditional Nonlinear Optimal Perturbation (CNOP) method. The study discovered that the CNOP method reveals the process of one-way interaction between Fengshen and Fung-wong. Moreover, if the region of Fung-wong was selected for verification, the sensitivity area was mainly located in the region of Fengshen and presented a half-ring structure; if the region of Fengshen was selected for verification, most of the sensitivity areas were located in the region between the Fengshen and the subtropical high, far away from Fung-wong. This indicated that Fung-wong is mainly steered by Fengshen, but Fengshen is mainly affected by the subtropical high. The sensitivity experiment showed that the initial errors in the CNOP-identified sensitive areas have larger impacts on the verification-area prediction than those near the typhoon center and their developments take a large proportion in the whole domain. This suggests that the CNOP-identified sensitive areas do have large influence on the verification-area prediction.