Evaluating the Spatiotemporal Evolution of the Gale-Wind Field after Landfall in Models with Varying Resolution

Landfalling hurricanes bring a variety of meteorological hazards to coastal and inland areas. Linking the physics of landfalling hurricanes to the quantification of their social impacts and risks relies on a better inland forecast of the size of the gale-wind field and the total precipitation. Meanwhile, the size of a hurricane and its related precipitation impacts can be independent of its intensity. Therefore, there is a rising call for assessing the hurricane wind field forecast after landfall. This work investigates the effectiveness of models with varying resolutions in capturing the spatiotemporal evolution of the gale-wind field after landfall. Furthermore, we investigate the extent to which the difference in gale-wind coverage between high- and lower-resolution models can impact the simulated total precipitation, and the underlying reasons for this. Several NOAA models are evaluated in this work, including the global-uniform-resolution and two-way-nested configurations of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) System for High-resolution modeling for Earth-to-Local Domains (SHiELD), the operational Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System (HAFS-A) and Global Forecast System (GFS). We propose a new gale-wind coverage approximation for the evaluations. Gale-wind field observations applied to assess the models are generated from multiple resources and complemented through a theoretical methodology developed by Chen et al. (2023).