Case Study: SLOSH using Gridded Wind Fields for Hurricane Irene-2011 and Sandy-2012

As part of an ongoing effort to improve the National Weather Service's (NWS) Sea Lake and Overland Surges from Hurricanes (SLOSH) model, the NWS's Meteorological Development Laboratory (MDL) is analyzing the performance of the SLOSH model when driven by gridded wind fields provided by various wind models or analyses.

The SLOSH model developed by MDL is used for climatological, deterministic, and probabilistic prediction of storm surge induced by hurricanes making landfall. It is the operational standard used by the National Hurricane Center for storm surge and coastal inundation forecasting. The SLOSH model is currently driven by a parametric wind model based on forecast track, radius of maximum wind speed, and pressure difference between the ambient environment and the center of the storm. SLOSH has recently been modified to also use gridded inputs for wind vectors and atmospheric pressure, which allows various forecast and observational wind products to be utilized in the model analysis process.

This paper will discuss advantages and limitations of the spatial/temporal interpolation methodologies used with the gridded wind field inputs, as well as compare the SLOSH model's parametric winds to various gridded wind fields from hurricanes Irene-2011 and Sandy-2012. The paper will conclude by extending the previous study by Kerr, et al. (2013), which tested the SLOSH model with gridded winds for hurricanes Ike-2008 and Rita-2005, to hurricanes Irene-2011 and Sandy-2012.