Publication Date:
2022-05-26
Description:
Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2019. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Physical Oceanography 49(11), (2019): 2883-2900, doi: 10.1175/JPO-D-19-0124.1.
Description:
Hurricanes interact with the Gulf Stream in the South Atlantic Bight (SAB) through a wide variety of processes, which are crucial to understand for prediction of open-ocean and coastal hazards during storms. However, it remains unclear how waves are modified by large-scale ocean currents under storm conditions, when waves are aligned with the storm-driven circulation and tightly coupled to the overlying wind field. Hurricane Matthew (2016) impacted the U.S. Southeast coast, causing extensive coastal change due to large waves and elevated water levels. The hurricane traveled on the continental shelf parallel to the SAB coastline, with the right side of the hurricane directly over the Gulf Stream. Using the Coupled Ocean–Atmosphere–Wave–Sediment Transport modeling system, we investigate wave–current interaction between Hurricane Matthew and the Gulf Stream. The model simulates ocean currents and waves over a grid encompassing the U.S. East Coast, with varied coupling of the hydrodynamic and wave components to isolate the effect of the currents on the waves, and the effect of the Gulf Stream relative to storm-driven circulation. The Gulf Stream modifies the direction of the storm-driven currents beneath the right side of the hurricane. Waves transitioned from following currents that result in wave lengthening, through negative current gradients that result in wave steepening and dissipation. Wave–current interaction over the Gulf Stream modified maximum coastal total water levels and changed incident wave directions at the coast by up to 20°, with strong implications for the morphodynamic response and stability of the coast to the hurricane.
Description:
C.A. Hegermiller is grateful to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Postdoctoral Scholarship program and the WHOI-U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) cooperative agreement for support. This project was supported by the USGS Coastal and Marine Hazards and Resources Program and by the Office of Naval Research, Increasing the Fidelity of Morphological Storm Impact Predictions Project. Thank you to the internal and external reviewers for improving the quality of this work, and to conversations within the Woods Hole community during the development of the experiment and analysis of the results. Model data can be found at http://geoport.whoi.edu/thredds/catalog/sand/usgs/users/chegermiller/projects/WCI_JPO_2019/catalog.html. Figure color maps are from Thyng et al. (2016).
Description:
2020-05-01
Keywords:
Hurricanes
;
Waves, oceanic
;
Coupled models
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
