Identification

Title

Investigating the impact of high-resolution land-sea masks on hurricane forecasts in HWRF

Abstract

Realistic wind information is critical for accurate forecasts of landfalling hurricanes. In order to provide more realistic near-surface wind forecasts of hurricanes over coastal regions, high-resolution land-sea masks are considered. As a leading hurricane modeling system, the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Hurricane Weather Research Forecast (HWRF) system has been widely used in both operational and research environments for studying hurricanes in different basins. In this study, high-resolution land-sea mask datasets are introduced to the nested domain of HWRF, for the first time, as an attempt to improve hurricane wind forecasts. Four destructive North Atlantic hurricanes (Harvey and Irma in 2017; and Florence and Michael in 2018), which brought historic wind damage and storm surge along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and Northeastern Gulf Coast, were selected to demonstrate the methodology of extending the capability to HWRF, due to the introduction of the high-resolution land-sea masks into the nested domains for the first time. A preliminary assessment of the numerical experiments with HWRF shows that the introduction of high-resolution land-sea masks into the nested domains produce significantly more accurate definitions of coastlines, land-use, and soil types. Furthermore, the high-resolution land-sea mask not only improves the quality of simulated wind information along the coast, but also improves the hurricane track, intensity, and storm-size predictions.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d78d00kc

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2020-08-22T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact