Real-Case Simulations of Hurricane-Ocean Interaction Using A High-Resolution Coupled Model: Effects on Hurricane Intensity

By M. Bender, Isaac Ginis. 2000

482 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In order to investigate the effect of tropical cyclone‐ocean interaction on the intensity of observed hurricanes, the GFDL movable triply nested mesh hurricane model was coupled with a high-resolution version of the Princeton Ocean Model. The ocean model had 1 /68 uniform resolution, which matched the horizontal resolution of the hurricane model in its innermost grid. Experiments were run with and without inclusion of the coupling for two cases of Hurricane Opal (1995) and one case of Hurricane Gilbert (1988) in the Gulf of Mexico and two cases each of Hurricanes Felix (1995) and Fran (1996) in the western Atlantic. The results confirmed the conclusions suggested by the earlier idealized studies that the cooling of the sea surface induced by the tropical cyclone will have a significant impact on the intensity of observed storms, particularly for slow moving storms where the SST decrease is greater. In each of the seven forecasts, the ocean coupling led to substantial improvements in the prediction of storm intensity measured by the storm’s minimum sea level pressure. Without the effect of coupling the GFDL model incorrectly forecasted 25-hPa deepening of Gilbert as it moved across the Gulf of Mexico. With the coupling included, the model storm deepened only 10 hPa, which was much closer to the observed amount of 4 hPa. Similarly, during the period that Opal moved very slowly in the southern Gulf of Mexico, the coupled model produced a large SST decrease northwest of the Yucatan and slow deepening consistent with the observations. The uncoupled model using the initial NCEP SSTs predicted rapid deepening of 58 hPa during the same period. Improved intensity prediction was achieved both for Hurricanes Felix and Fran in the western Atlantic. For the case of Hurricane Fran, the coarse resolution of the NCEP SST analysis could not resolve Hurricane Edouard’s wake, which was produced when Edouard moved in nearly an identical path to Fran four days earlier. As a result, the operational GFDL forecast using the operational SSTs and without coupling incorrectly forecasted 40-hPa deepening while Fran remained at nearly constant intensity as it crossed the wake. When the coupled model was run with Edouard’s cold wake generated by imposing hurricane wind forcing during the ocean initialization, the intensity prediction was significantly improved. The model also correctly predicted the rapid deepening that occurred as Fran began to move away from the cold wake. These results suggest the importance of an accurate initial SST analysis as well as the inclusion of the ocean coupling, for accurate hurricane intensity prediction with a dynamical model. Recently, the GFDL hurricane‐ocean coupled model used in these case studies was run on 163 forecasts during the 1995‐98 seasons. Improved intensity forecasts were again achieved with the mean absolute error in the forecast of central pressure reduced by about 26% compared to the operational GFDL model. During the 1998 season, when the system was run in near‐real time, the coupled model improved the intensity forecasts for all storms with central pressure higher than 940 hPa although the most significant improvement (;60%) occurred in the intensity range of 960‐970 hPa. These much larger sample sets confirmed the conclusion from the case studies, that the hurricane‐ocean interaction is an important physical mechanism in the intensity of observed tropical cyclones.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/026c7bd918a79ae80a4acb43c6bd325c7e5f7ed2

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In Atmospheric Science

1. Alexander Khain
2. Jimy Dudhia
3. Barry H. Lynn
4. M. Roxy
5. Vineet Kumar Singh
6. Z. Pu
7. Xuanli Li
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In Oceanography

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2. Vineet Kumar Singh
3. R. Tuleya
4. I. Lin
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6. Jimy Dudhia
7. Chia‐Ying Lee
8. Alexander Khain

Citations in the corpus

• Tropical cyclones in a T159 resolution global climate model: comparison with observations and re-analyses (2007, background): “The dominant reason for this appears to be insufficient horizontal resolution of present operational models (Bender and Ginis, 2000) but presumably also the handling of convective processes in the models (Shen et al., 2006a). Because of the enormous social and economic impact of tropical cyclones, i”
• Directional Wind-Wave Coupling in Fully Coupled Atmosphere-Wave-Ocean Models: Results from CBLAST-Hurricane (2013, background): “The upper-ocean response to hur-ricane forcing has been documented in some detail in modeling and observational studies (e.g., Price 1981; Price et al. 1994; Shay and Elsberry 1987; Sanford et al. 1987; Bender and Ginis 2000; Shay et al. 2000).”
• Effects of the Cold Core Eddy on Tropical Cyclone Intensity and Structure under Idealized Air–Sea Interaction Conditions (2013, background): “…atmosphere– ocean coupled models further clarified the negative effects of ocean response on TC development in detail by considering more realistic and complex coupling processes (e.g., Bender et al. 1993; Bender and Ginis 2000; Chan et al. 2001; Zhu et al. 2004; Chen et al. 2010).”
• Impact of CO2-Induced Warming on Hurricane Intensities as Simulated in a Hurricane Model with Ocean Coupling (2001, methodology): “In particular, we examine the magnitude of the cold SST wake generated by storms under various conditions in order to gain insight into why ocean coupling has only a minor effect on CO2-induced intensification of hurricanes in our simulations.”
• Sensitivity of Numerical Simulation of Early Rapid Intensification of Hurricane Emily (2005) to Cloud Microphysical and Planetary Boundary Layer Parameterizations (2008, background): “However, the intensity forecast still remains a challenging problem in both operational and research communities (Bender and Ginis 2000; Krishnamurti et al. 2005, Rogers et al. 2006).”
• Aerosol Effects on Intensity of Landfalling Hurricanes as Seen from Simulations with the WRF Model with Spectral Bin Microphysics (2010, methodology): “Khain et al. (2008a) simulated the evolution of Hurricane Katrina (August 2005) during its movement in the Gulf of Mexico using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model [National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) version] with two nested grids. The resolutions of the finest and of the o”
• A review of the ocean-atmosphere interactions during tropical cyclones in the north Indian Ocean (2020, background): “(Bender and Ginis 2000; Zhu and Zhang 2006; Walker et al. 2014; Scoccimarro et al. 2017; Chen et al. 2018), mainly due to the reduction in the surface enthalpy fluxes (Bender et al.”
• The Effect of the Ocean Eddy on Tropical Cyclone Intensity (2007, methodology): “This negative feedback to the TC intensity is clearly a function of the oceanic thermal conditions (Bender et al. 1993; Schade and Emanuel 1999; Hong et al. 2000; Shay et al. 2000; Bender and Ginis 2000; Chan et al. 2001; Lin et al. 2005).”
• The effect of translation speed upon the intensity of tropical cyclones over the tropical ocean (2012, unknown): “…negative influences is the SST feed-back associated with the surface water cooling induced by the storm passage [e.g., Schade and Emanuel , 1999; Bender and Ginis , 2000; Ginis , 2002; Goni et al. , 2009], which reduces heat fluxes from the ocean extracted by the storm and thereby inhibits the…”