Evolutionary Spectral Analyses of a Powerful Typhoon at the Sutong Bridge Site Based on the HHT

To investigate the nonstationary characteristics of strong typhoons, this paper considers the evolutionary spectral characteristics of strong typhoons based on the Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT). Discrete expressions are determined for the evolutionary spectral analysis based on the HHT. The study indicates that the classic empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method fails to extract all of the high-frequency fluctuations from wind velocity data, and the time-averaged power spectrum obtained directly using the HHT cannot provide the true wind velocity spectrum. The degrees of nonstationarity of different-order IMF components are analysed and a synthesized method of analysing the evolutionary spectrum and time-averaged power spectrum of a strong typhoon is proposed. To avoid the energy leakage problem that exists in HHT spectral analyses, the Gram-Schmidt method is used to orthogonalize the intrinsic mode function (IMF) components. The study indicates that when the orthogonalization is implemented in accordance with the sequence from high-order IMF components to low-order ones, the orthogonalized components retain the same good Hilbert property as that of the IMFs. The synthesized method proposed yields a time-averaged power spectrum that is consistent with the Fourier spectrum in value and can produce the energy distributions of a typhoon in the time and frequency domains simultaneously.