Publication Date:
2022-10-26
Description:
Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2020. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans 125(11), (2020): e2019JC015851, doi:10.1029/2019JC015851.
Description:
Influences of the ocean mixed layer (OML) dynamics on intensity, pathway, and landfall of October 2012 Hurricane Sandy were examined through an experiment using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. The WRF model was run for two cases with or without coupling to the OML. The OML in the WRF was calculated by an oceanic mixed layer submodel. The initial conditions of the depth and mean water temperature of the OML were specified using Global‐FVCOM and Global‐HYCOM fields. The comparison results between these two cases clearly show that including the OML dynamics enhanced the contribution of vertical mixing to the air‐sea heat flux. When the hurricane moved toward the coast, the local OML rapidly deepened with an increase of storm wind. Intense vertical mixing brought cold water in the deep ocean toward the surface to produce a cold wake underneath the storm, with the lowest sea temperature at the maximum wind zone. This process led to a significant latent heat loss from the ocean within the storm and hence rapid drops of the air temperature and vapor mixing ratio above the sea surface. As a result, the storm was intensified as the central sea level pressure dropped. Improving air pressure simulation with OML tended to reduce the storm size and strengthened the storm intensity and hence provided a better simulation of hurricane pathway and landfall.
Description:
This work was supported by the MIT Sea Grant College Program through grant 2017‐R/RCM‐49C and 2012‐R/RC‐127, the NSF grants OCE1459096, OCE1332207, and OCE1332666, the NOAA‐funded IOOS NERACOOS program for NECOFS with subcontract numbers NA16NOS0120023 and NERACOOS A002 and A007, and the NOAA‐CINAR Hurricane Sandy fund. The development of the Global‐FVCOM system has been supported by NSF grants OCE1603000. S. Li was supported partially by the oversea Ph.D. fellowship from the China Scholarship Council (No. 1409010025).
Description:
2021-04-07
Keywords:
Mixed layer
;
Numerical model
;
Hurricane
;
FVCOM
;
WRF
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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