Hurricanes over Houston Metropolitan Area: Understanding the Interplay of City and Storms

Houston, a highly urbanized coastal metropolis with 2.3 million residents, is susceptible to tropical cyclones that frequently bring in intense rainfall that leads to casualties and damage to infrastructure. Recent trend indicates an increased rainfall extremes associated with hurricanes, underscoring the need to investigate and decouple the impacts of urbanization and warming climate.

As a large coastal city, the expanding urban landscape likely influences the complex interactions between the land, ocean, and atmospheric processes, particularly in a convection prone environment over Houston. This study investigates the influence of local scale urban dynamics on mesoscale systems by examining multiple hurricanes that made landfall on or near Houston.

Using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, configured with three nested domains at 9 km, 3 km, and 1 km resolutions, we simulate eight hurricanes of varying intensities, focusing on Houston at the center of the innermost domain. Multiple experiments are designed to assess the impact of decadal changes in land cover from 1990 to 2020, incorporating an accurate representations of cities using the local climate zones. Preliminary analysis reveals that accurate representation of cities in WRF model better captures the distribution of rainfall. The surface roughness associated with urban areas influences inner-core precipitation, and most experiments show a redistribution of the outer rainbands, which has critical implications for storm warning systems and flood risk management.

Further analysis will explore the role of urban heat island effect in the context of thermal perturbations and its influence on the boundary layer.