Plot of the month for April 2017 is from Pier Luigi Vidale, who uses the high-resolution UPSCALE data to examine tropical cyclones.

We construct advanced models of the atmosphere and ocean, which we deploy at high resolution, seeking to resolve the phenomena that underpin our understanding of weather and climate variability and change. As well as studying these systems in high detail, using process-based diagnostics and metrics, we also use advanced visualisation to gain an overall picture of system interactions.

The figure (click for an animation) shows the evolution of two tropical disturbances in the Atlantic Ocean, one of which evolves into a full tropical cyclone, while the other moves northward and undergoes a transition to an extratropical cyclone.

Figure | Animation of twin cyclones in HadGEM3-GA3.0. (Click the image for a larger version.)

The model used was HadGEM3-GA3.0 at a horizontal resolution of approximately 25km in the mid-latitudes (N512), part of the atmosphere-only UPSCALE simulations.

This is ongoing work.