A Hydrodynamical Atmosphere/Ocean Coupled Modeling System for Multiple Tropical Cyclones

• Main Authors: Ghassan J. Alaka, Dmitry Sheinin, Biju Thomas, Lew Gramer, Zhan Zhang, Bin Liu, Hyun-Sook Kim, Avichal Mehra
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-08-01
• Series: Atmosphere
• Subjects: tropical cyclones; atmosphere/ocean coupling; sea surface temperatures; numerical weather prediction
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/11/8/869

The goal of this paper is to introduce a new multi-storm atmosphere/ocean coupling scheme that was implemented and tested in the Basin-Scale Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF-B) model. HWRF-B, an experimental model developed at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and supported by the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program, is configured with multiple storm-following nested domains to produce high-resolution predictions for several tropical cyclones (TCs) within the same forecast integration. The new coupling scheme parallelizes atmosphere/ocean interactions for each nested domain in HWRF-B, and it may be applied to any atmosphere/ocean coupled system. TC forecasts from this new hydrodynamical modeling system were produced in the North Atlantic and eastern North Pacific from 2017–2019. The performance of HWRF-B was evaluated, including forecasts of TC track, intensity, structure (e.g., surface wind radii), and intensity change, and simulated sea-surface temperatures were compared with satellite observations. Median forecast skill scores showed significant improvement over the operational HWRF at most forecast lead times for track, intensity, and structure. Sea-surface temperatures cooled by 1–8 °C for the five HWRF-B case studies, demonstrating the utility of the model to study the impact of the ocean on TC intensity forecasting. These results show the value of a multi-storm modeling system and provide confidence that the multi-storm coupling scheme was implemented correctly. Future TC models within NOAA, especially the Unified Forecast System’s Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System, would benefit from the multi-storm coupling scheme whose utility and performance are demonstrated in HWRF-B here.