The 23rd Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology

JP1.5
NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF AIR-SEA INTERACTION UNDER HIGH WIND CONDITIONS- A CASE STUDY OF HURRICANE DEVELOPMENT

J.-W Bao, CIRES/University of Colorado and NOAA/ETL, Boulder, CO; and J. M. Wilczak, C. K. Choi, L. H. Kantha, W. Wang, and J. Dudhia

Air-sea interaction under high wind conditions is dominated by processes associated with intensive mixing in the oceanic mixed layer (OML), sea spray evaporation due to wave breaking and wave modulation of flux transfer at the air-sea interface. How these processes play collectively in air-sea interaction is not understood to the same degree as the working of each single process. The lack of the understanding is due to insufficient simultaneous observations of momentum, sensible and latent fluxes across the air-sea interface along with all the parameters possibly affecting the flux transfer processes under high wind conditions. In this paper, results from numerical sensitivity experiments of the development of a hurricane over the Gulf of Mexico will be presented. These experiments are carried out using a limited-area air-sea coupled modeling system developed at NOAA/ETL. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the collective impact of the mixing in OML, sea spray and sea-surface waves on air-sea interaction under high wind conditions

The 23rd Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology