TY - JOUR
T1 - Investigation of Tropical Cyclone Wind Models With Application to Storm Tide Simulations
AU - Wang, Shuai
AU - Lin, Ning
AU - Gori, Avantika
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank three anonymous reviewers for helping improve the manuscript. This study is supported by National Science Foundation (Grant 1652448) and Princeton Intellectual Property Accelerator Fund program.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022. The Authors.
PY - 2022/9/16
Y1 - 2022/9/16
N2 - The hazards induced by tropical cyclones (TCs), for example, high winds, extreme precipitation, and storm tides, are closely related to the TC surface wind field. Parametric models for TC surface wind distribution have been widely used for hazards and risk analysis due to their simplicity and efficiency in application. Here we revisit the parametric modeling of TC wind fields, including the symmetrical and asymmetrical components, and its applications in storm tide modeling in the North Atlantic. The asymmetrical wind field has been related to TC motion and vertical wind shear; however, we find that a simple and empirical background-wind model, based solely on a rotation and scaling of the TC motion vector, can largely capture the observed surface wind asymmetry. The implicit inclusion of the wind shear effect can be understood with the climatological relationship between the general TC motion and wind shear directions during hurricane seasons. For the symmetric wind field, the widely used Holland wind profile is chosen as a benchmark model, and we find that a physics-based complete wind profile model connecting the inner core and outer region performs superiorly compared to a wind analysis data set. When used as wind forcing for storm tide simulations, the physics-based complete wind profile integrated with the background-wind asymmetry model can reproduce the observed storm tides with lower errors than the often-used Holland model coupled with a translation-speed-based method.
AB - The hazards induced by tropical cyclones (TCs), for example, high winds, extreme precipitation, and storm tides, are closely related to the TC surface wind field. Parametric models for TC surface wind distribution have been widely used for hazards and risk analysis due to their simplicity and efficiency in application. Here we revisit the parametric modeling of TC wind fields, including the symmetrical and asymmetrical components, and its applications in storm tide modeling in the North Atlantic. The asymmetrical wind field has been related to TC motion and vertical wind shear; however, we find that a simple and empirical background-wind model, based solely on a rotation and scaling of the TC motion vector, can largely capture the observed surface wind asymmetry. The implicit inclusion of the wind shear effect can be understood with the climatological relationship between the general TC motion and wind shear directions during hurricane seasons. For the symmetric wind field, the widely used Holland wind profile is chosen as a benchmark model, and we find that a physics-based complete wind profile model connecting the inner core and outer region performs superiorly compared to a wind analysis data set. When used as wind forcing for storm tide simulations, the physics-based complete wind profile integrated with the background-wind asymmetry model can reproduce the observed storm tides with lower errors than the often-used Holland model coupled with a translation-speed-based method.
KW - storm surge
KW - tropical cyclone
KW - wind model
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U2 - 10.1029/2021JD036359
DO - 10.1029/2021JD036359
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85137891961
SN - 2169-897X
VL - 127
JO - Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres
JF - Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres
IS - 17
M1 - e2021JD036359
ER -