A revised model for the radial profiles of hurricane winds

Parametric radial profiles of hurricane winds form the basis of current approaches to assessing wind return periods and the development of engineering standards in hurricane-prone regions. In particular, the profile developed by Holland (1980) has been used extensively as the basis for reconstructing hurricane wind fields in a wide range of applications, including: engineering design; to drive a slab boundary layer model; to aid reconstruction of historical cyclones; and for generating ocean wave climatologies.

Here we present a revision to the Holland (1980) parametric model. Our approach uses information readily available from hurricane archives or in hurricane warning information. The original model utilized central and environmental surface pressures, maximum winds, and radius of maximum winds. In the revision we include a capacity to incorporate additional wind observations at some radius within the hurricane circulation. If surface observations are used, then a surface wind profile will result, obviating the need for deriving a boundary layer reduction from the gradient wind level. The model has considerably less sensitivity to data errors compared to the original and will be shown to reproduce hurricane reconnaissance wind profiles with high accuracy.