A Wave-Induced Negative Feedback between the Stratified Coastal Ocean and Land Falling Tropical Cyclones

Predicting tropical cyclone structure and evolution remains challenging. Particularly, the coastal surface wave interactions with
tropical cyclones have received no attention. Through a series of state-of-the art high-resolution, fully-coupled ocean-wave
and atmosphere-ocean-wave experiments, we show here for the first time that wave-induced mixing is the major driver of
stratified coastal ocean ahead-of-cyclone-eye cooling, influencing the evolution of both the ocean and tropical cyclones. The
presence of a continental shelf leads to a small enhancement of the wind-driven cooling ahead of the cyclone compared to
deep water. However, the wave-induced vertical mixing contribution to the cooling is significantly larger than that caused by
by only the wind. In the fully-coupled atmosphere-ocean-wave mode, the maximum wind speed is weaker and the damaging footprint
area of hurricane-force winds is reduced by up to 50% due to the strong cooling ahead. Including wave-induced dynamics is
essential to improve landfalling tropical cyclone intensity predictions for the highly populated and vulnerable coasts.