Title: Impact of Land-sea Contrast in Modifying the Track of Landfalling Tropical Cyclones

Lecturer: Johnny Chan（Asia-Pacific Typhoon Collaborative Research Center） 

Inviter: Prof. Kun Zhao

Time: Wednesday April 22, 2026 at 2:30 AM

Venue: Lecture Hall D103, School of Atmospheric Sciences

Abstract: While significant improvements have been made in the track prediction of tropical cyclones (TCs) in the last two decades, track forecast errors associated with landfalling TCs can still be appreciable. This is especially important because a wrong landfall location would lead to a misplacement of disaster preparedness efforts, and hence potential large loss of life and property

We first present case studies demonstrating the “systematic” biases in the numerical weather prediction (NWP) models in their prediction of landfalling TCs. Specifically, the predicted tracks tend to be slower and to the right of the observed ones. Results of idealized numerical simulations show that different land surfaces can lead to changes in both the direction and speed of landfalling TCs. Modifying the land-surface representation for real TCs in numerical experiments show that the predicted tracks are much closer to the observed. These results suggest the importance of re-examining the land surface distribution as well as boundary-layer parameterization in the NWP models.