Comparisons of Four Methods for Tropical Cyclone Center Detection in a High-Resolution Simulation

The tropical cyclone (TC) center position is often needed in the study of inner-core processes although there is currently no consensus on the definition of the TC center. While previous studies evaluated center-detecting methods in terms of the center position, vertical tilt and decomposed symmetric, and asymmetric circulations, this study used the 1-km resolution output of the predicted Hurricane Wilma (2005) at 5-minute intervals to evaluate the four TC centers that are frequently used in the diagnostic analysis of the inner-core dynamics processes: the pressure centroid center (PCC), the potential vorticity (PV) centroid center (PVC), the maximum tangential wind center (MTC), and the minimum pressure variance center (MVC) by focusing on the evolution of the small-scale track oscillation and vortex tilt.