Case Study of a Developing African Easterly Wave during NAMMA: An Energetic Point of View

Abstract The West African perturbation that subsequently evolved into Hurricane Helene (2006) during NASA’s African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis (NAMMA), 15 August–14 September 2006, and AMMA’s third special observing period (SOP-3), 15–29 September 2006, has been simulated with the nonhydrostatic Méso-NH model using parameterized convection. The simulated disturbance evolved over West Africa and the adjacent eastern tropical Atlantic through interactions between different processes at the convective scale, mesoscale, and synoptic scale. The aim of this paper is to quantify the energetics of the simulated disturbance. A set of energy equations is first developed in the hydrostatic case to solve the limitations of Lorenz’s analysis when applied to a finite domain. It is shown that this approach is also valid in the compressible and in the anelastic case in order to apply it to the Méso-NH results. Application to the simulated pre-Helene disturbance allows one to determine the most important terms in these equations. These simplifications are taken into account to derive an energy cycle including barotropic and baroclinic conversions of eddy kinetic energy. The development of the simulated system was found to result from barotropic–baroclinic growth over West Africa and barotropic growth over the tropical eastern Atlantic. It is suggested that most of these energy conversions were the result of an adjustment of the wind field in response to the pressure decrease, presumably caused by convective activity.