Lynn Sparling and Ross Dixon, UMBC Department of Physics, and Jeffrey Halverson, UMBC Department of Geography and Environmental Science

Our goal is to better predict intensity changes and forecast extreme precipitation events in the extra-tropical transition of hurricanes. Freshwater flooding is the number one killer associated with land falling hurricanes. Our approach uses the North American Regional Reanalysis to examine fields such as potential vorticity, diabatic heating, and frontogenesis. Because these fields vary to a large degree temporally and spatially, we intend to run trajectories in order to view the evolution of these fields in a Lagrangian frame.