On the size distribution of Atlantic tropical cyclones

The size of a tropical cyclone is known to vary considerably across storms, though little is understood about the environmental and internal factors that modulate it. Making use of newly available extended tropical cyclone records that include information about storm structure, we examine the size distribution of Atlantic tropical cyclones, using as a metric the radius of vanishing storm winds normalized by the theoretical upper bound given by the ratio of the potential intensity to the Coriolis parameter. We find that the distribution of this normalized outer radius is closely log-normal. Citation: Dean, L., K. A. Emanuel, and D. R. Chavas (2009), On the size distribution of Atlantic tropical cyclones, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L14803, doi: 10.1029/2009GL039051.