Tropical Cyclone Remote Sensing

Dear Colleagues,

Tropical cyclones cause massive economic losses and sudden mortality over ample coastal areas of the planet. Indeed, hurricanes and typhoons are devastating phenomena that require societal attention. Estimating hurricane intensity, frequency and path in a climate emergency scenario is an active research area, and on those topics remote sensing can play an important role. Optimizing Earth Observation (EO) for emergency management is a timely and relevant research area of societal interest.

In the Physics realm, tropical cyclones are intriguing thermodynamical machines driven by enthalpy exchanges in the sea/atmosphere interface that embeds numerous atmospheric processes. Tropical cyclones form and evolve as the result of complex multi-scale processes and interactions. The role of the thermodynamic and kinematic structure of large-scale environment has long been recognized. Research over the past decade has indicated that the hurricane inner core processes might play a crucial role in determining the storm’s intensity and size. Yet, understanding of these multi-scale processes is still lacking, bringing to the forefront the need to investigate the important role of the convective organization. Also, there are still many unanswered questions about the physical processes that determine tropical cyclone intensity. Remote sensing technology can play an active role to advance such topic.

While tropical cyclones are natural phenomena there is clear evidence that human action is a key ingredient in evaluating their impact. As climate changes due to both anthropogenic and natural influences, it is crucial to improve our understanding and ability to project changes in tropical cyclone activity in all the oceanic basin. Indeed, there is every reason to pool international expertise to increase our knowledge on tropical cyclones.

The Special Issue will be devoted to disseminating research using remote sensing to investigate these interesting meteorological phenomena. Examples include remotely-sensed analyses of tropical cyclones and disturbances using infrared wavelengths and microwave frequencies, rapid intensification methods that use satellite information at some stage, genesis research, and datasets and databases devoted to advance our knowledge on the genesis, intensification and future of tropical cyclones.

The scope is very broad. There are many other such cross-cutting topics that could be contributed to the Special Issue, including insurance, natural hazards assessment and societal/communication topics.

The Special Issue welcomes papers that deal mainly with modeling but use satellite information for illustrative purposes, and case-study contributions making some use of satellite data and flight campaigns. It is also open to radar, dropsonde and general airborne observations of tropical cyclones. Papers on applications of remote sensing to study individual tropical cyclones and numerical case studies on specific hurricanes would be welcome contributions to the Special Issue. Papers on tropical cyclones in the Pacific, Indian and Australian basins will be warmly appreciated to balance the current research bias toward the North Atlantic area.

Prof. Dr. Francisco J. Tapiador
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Tropical Cyclones
• Hurricanes
• Typhoons
• Rapid intensification
• Tropical depression
• Fujiwhara effect
• Severe cyclonic storms
• Eyewall replacement cycle