Investigations of Tropical Cyclone Thermodynamic Structure using NASA TROPICS Observations

New constellations to provide high-resolution atmospheric observations from microwave sounders operating in low-earth orbit are now coming online and are demonstrating the potential to provide operationally useful data. The first of these missions, the NASA TROPICS (Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats) Earth Venture (EVI-3) mission, was successfully launched into orbit on May 8 and May 25, 2023 (two CubeSats in each of the two launches).  TROPICS is now providing nearly all-weather observations of 3-D temperature and humidity, as well as cloud ice and precipitation horizontal structure, at high temporal resolution to conduct high-value science investigations of tropical cyclones. TROPICS is providing rapid-refresh microwave measurements (median refresh rate of better than 60 minutes early in the mission with four functional CubeSats, and now approximately 70-90 minutes with three functional CubeSats) over the tropics that can be used to observe the thermodynamics of the troposphere and precipitation structure for storm systems at the mesoscale and synoptic scale over the entire storm lifecycle. Hundreds of high-resolution images of tropical cyclones have been captured thus far by the TROPICS mission, revealing detailed structure of the eyewall and surrounding rain bands.  The new 205-GHz channel in particular (together with a traditional channel near 92 GHz) is providing new information on the inner storm structure, and, coupled with the relatively frequent revisit and low downlink latency, is already informing tropical cyclone analysis at operational centers.  A neural network algorithm to retrieve the atmospheric temperature and moisture vertical profiles has recently been developed and validated, with retrieval uncertainties approaching those of state-of-the-art microwave sounders, but with much better revisit rate. In this presentation, we highlight the use of these high-revisit thermodynamic data from TROPICS to better characterize storm structure and environmental conditions over a variety of cases over the nearly two-year mission lifetime to date.