Simulations of landfalling tropical cyclones using a movable nested-mesh coupled air-sea interaction model

A new movable nested-mesh coupled air-sea interaction model has been developed. It consists of the GFDL hurricane model and the URI movable nested mesh ocean model. The major advantage of the new model is the use of the movable nested-mesh structure to conserve computational time and memory. This is achieved by allowing the inner meshes to follow the simulated tropical cyclones and thus using the high horizontal resolution only where it is most needed, near the storm center. The nested system is fully relocatable and can be introduced at any geographical location at any time. The URI ocean model has the ability for the movable inner meshes to cross coastlines that allows simulations of landfalling tropical cyclones. The new coupled model has been successfully tested on the western Pacific tropical cyclones.