Taiga Tsukada receives Yamamoto Award from the Meteorological Society of Japan
By Theresa Barosh | Sept. 2025
The Meteorological Society of Japan honors Colorado State University Postdoctoral Fellow Taiga Tsukada with the Yamamoto Award. Tsukada receives the award in recognition for his work developing a novel wind estimation method using high-frequency observations from meteorological satellites.
“I am honored to have received this award, which is regarded in Japan as a gateway to success for young meteorologists. It feels as though I have been given encouragement for carrying out my research far from home,” said Tsukada.
The award ceremony and commemorative lectures will be held on November 5 in Japan. For his commemorative lecture, Tsukada plans to focus primarily on his work and present further applications being pursued at CIRA.
The Research
Tsukada’s work shows potential for measurements from geostationary meteorological satellites to shed new light on tropical cyclones.
His work builds on Colorado State University Department of Atmospheric Science Professor Emeritus Wayne Schubert‘s previous work. “My study is positioned as an observational validation of the tropical cyclone dynamics that Wayne’s group investigated theoretically and numerically from 1999.”
Using satellites to track the clouds in tropical cyclone eyes allows for a new way to measure wind speeds. Motivation for the study comes from the fact that observations of winds in the eye of tropical cyclones are limited.
“There has been no observation that continuously covers the entire eye over a long period,” said Tsukada. “However, with my approach, such an observational validation has become possible.”
Tsukada worked with the Himawari-8 satellite to test the new method. His estimations of winds in the eye agreed with in-situ dropsonde observations, coming from small atmospheric instruments released from aircraft. He identified features, called transient azimuthal wavenumber-1 features, that contribute to the tropical cyclone’s inward transport of angular momentum and acceleration of eye rotation.
In the eye of Typhoon Lan from 2017, the rotation speed increased by about 1.5 times within an hour – a short-term acceleration. From examining this type of short-term acceleration, Tsukada suggests that angular momentum transport associated with mesoscale vortices played an important role in the increase in rotation speed of the tropical cyclone, as well as, the homogenization of the rotation in the eye.
Tsukada plans to continue to work with other CIRA researchers to deepen understanding of tropical cyclones and develop satellite applications.