Comparison of Single Doppler and Multiple Doppler Wind Retrievals in Hurricane Matthew (2016)

Abstract. Hurricane Matthew (2016) was observed by the NEXRAD KAMX polarimetric radar and NOAA P-3 airborne radar near the coast of the southeastern United States for several hours, providing a novel opportunity to evaluate and compare single and multiple Doppler wind retrieval techniques for tropical cyclone flows. The generalized velocity track display (GVTD) technique can retrieve a subset of the wind field from a single ground-based Doppler radar under the assumption of nearly axisymmetric rotational wind, but is shown to have errors from aliasing of unresolved wind components. An improved technique that mitigates errors due to storm motion is derived in this study, although some spatial aliasing remains due to limited information content from the single Doppler measurements. A spline-based variational wind retrieval technique called SAMURAI can retrieve the full three-dimensional wind field from airborne radar fore-aft pseudo-dual Doppler scanning, but is shown to have errors due to temporal aliasing from the non-simultaneous Doppler measurements. A comparison between the two techniques shows that the axisymmetric tangential winds are generally comparable between the two techniques after the improvements to GVTD retrievals. Fourier decomposition of asymmetric kinematic and convective structure shows more discrepancies due to spatial and temporal aliasing in the retrievals. The advantages and disadvantages of each technique for studying tropical cyclone structure are discussed, and suggest that complementary information can be retrieved from both single and multiple Doppler retrievals. Future improvements to the asymmetric flow assumptions in single Doppler analysis and steady-state assumptions in pseudo-dual Doppler analysis are required to reconcile differences in retrieved tropical cyclone structure.