Characterizing sea breeze events on the U.S. Northeast Coast using Observations and Model Simulations

Sea breezes play an important role in turbine hub-height winds and are one of the important dynamic coastal processes that introduce a source of uncertainties in offshore wind energy assessment. Different types of sea breezes (pure, corkscrew, and backdoor) have different coastal impacts (i.e, location and extension) and vary in wind power production. Thus, understanding of sea breezes from both the observational and modeling perspective has become critical for offshore wind energy development. We characterize the behavior of sea breezes along the northeastern coast of the U.S. through case studies, leveraging the observational dataset collected during the third Wind Forecast Improve Project (WFIP3). The WFIP3 field campaign (2024-2025) deploys onshore and offshore measurements, providing detailed observations of the horizontal and vertical structure of the marine boundary layer. We assess the capability of the operational High-Resolution Rapid Refresh version 4 (HRRR v4, implemented in Dec 2020) to represent the observed sea breeze characteristics, including its type, timing, extent, duration, and impacts on temperature and humidity changes. Preliminary analysis of identified sea breeze events in the summer of 2024 shows that the HRRR produced weaker sea breezes when compared to the observations. We also investigate the performance of an updated version of WRF with the improvements to the Mellor–Yamada–Nakanishi–Niino (MYNN) eddy-diffusivity / mass-flux (EDMF) planetary boundary layer (PBL) scheme, which is the PBL parameterization used within the HRRR, in simulating sea breezes and explore the effects of model physics changes through sensitivity experiments.