Meteorological Landscape of Tropical Cyclone

Abstract. A tropical cyclone is a meteorological phenomenon that produces heavy rainfall, damaging winds, thunderstorms, storm surges, among others. This is also a system of complex interactions between local sea-surface temperatures vertical atmospheric conditions, such as shear winds, and regional steering flows. A single discipline cannot rise to the challenge posed by the understanding of the mechanisms governing the birth, maturity, and decay of a tropical cyclone. Collaborative work between earth science and other disciplines can address such a challenge, by offering new angles of thinking and new techniques of research to apprehend such a complex phenomenon. In this study, we apply biological concepts such as the Waddington’s epigenetic landscape, and bioinformatics techniques like the graph-Hodge decomposition, to meteorology, to introduce an innovative way to characterize the evolution of three tropical cyclones: "Dolphin," "Nepartak," and "Meari". When applied to an ensemble prediction system, the result is a meteorological landscape depicting the creodes reflecting possible paths and their associated probabilities of realization.