Do African Easterly Waves matter?
Susanna Hopsch, Univ. at Albany/SUNY, Albany, NY Tropical cyclone activity over the tropical North Atlantic has often been related to changes in the large-scale environment such as variation in North Atlantic SSTs, various phases of ENSO and tropospheric deep wind shear. In such studies the timescales usually considered range from seasonal to multi-decadal. While the focus for numerous earlier studies has been the variability of tropical storms, hurricanes and/or the large scale environment, the variability of the precursor disturbances for these storms has not been discussed as much. The high-resolution ERA40 dataset has been analyzed for July, August, and September from 1979 through 2001 to generate a climatology of African Easterly Waves (AEWs) leaving the West African coast. By identifying all AEWs that were associated with named tropical cyclones over the main development region (MDR), we obtain a composite view of the structure and characteristics of these AEWs and their large-sc
