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Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society , 2021. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Zambon, J. B., He, R., Warner, J. C., & Hegermiller, C. A. Impact of SST and surface waves on Hurricane Florence (2018): a coupled modeling investigation. Weather and Forecasting, 36(5), (2021): 1713–1734, https://doi.org/10.1175/WAF-D-20-0171.1., Hurricane Florence (2018) devastated the coastal communities of the Carolinas through heavy rainfall that resulted in massive flooding. Florence was characterized by an abrupt reduction in intensity (Saffir–Simpson category 4 to category 1) just prior to landfall and synoptic-scale interactions that stalled the storm over the Carolinas for several days. We conducted a series of numerical modeling experiments in coupled and uncoupled configurations to examine the impact of sea surface temperature (SST) and ocean waves on storm characteristics. In addition to experiments using a fully coupled atmosphere–ocean–wave model, we introduced the capability of the atmospheric model to modulate wind stress and surface fluxes by ocean waves through data from an uncoupled wave model. We examined these experiments by comparing track, intensity, strength, SST, storm structure, wave height, surface roughness, heat fluxes, and precipitation in order to determine the impacts of resolving ocean conditions with varying degrees of coupling. We found differences in the storm’s intensity and strength, with the best correlation coefficient of intensity (r = 0.89) and strength (r = 0.95) coming from the fully coupled simulations. Further analysis into surface roughness parameterizations added to the atmospheric model revealed differences in the spatial distribution and magnitude of the largest roughness lengths. Adding ocean and wave features to the model further modified the fluxes due to more realistic cooling beneath the storm, which in turn modified the precipitation field. Our experiments highlight significant differences in how air–sea processes impact hurricane modeling. The storm characteristics of track, intensity, strength, and precipitation at landfall are crucial to predictability and forecasting of future landfalling hurricanes., This work has been supported by the U.S. Geological Survey Coastal/Marine Hazards and Resources Program, and by Congressional appropriations through the Additional Supplemental Appropriations for Disaster Relief Act of 2019 (H.R. 2157). The authors also wish to acknowledge research support through NSF Grant OCE-1559178 and NOAA Grant NA16NOS0120028. We also wish to thank Chris Sherwood from the U.S. Geological Survey for his help in deriving wave length from WAVEWATCH III data.

© The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Seim, H., Savidge, D., Andres, M., Bane, J., Edwards, C., Gawarkiewicz, G., He, R., Todd, R., Muglia, M., Zambon, J., Han, L., & Mao, S. Overview of the Processes driving Exchange at Cape Hatteras Program. Oceanography, (2022), https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2022.205., The Processes driving Exchange At Cape Hatteras (PEACH) program seeks to better understand seawater exchanges between the continental shelf and the open ocean near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. This location is where the Gulf Stream transitions from a boundary-trapped current to a free jet, and where robust along-shelf convergence brings cool, relatively fresh Middle Atlantic Bight and warm, salty South Atlantic Bight shelf waters together, forming an important and dynamic biogeographic boundary. The magnitude of this convergence implies large export of shelf water to the open ocean here. Background on the oceanography of the region provides motivation for the study and gives context for the measurements that were made. Science questions focus on the roles that wind forcing, Gulf Stream forcing, and lateral density gradients play in driving exchange. PEACH observational efforts include a variety of fixed and mobile observing platforms, and PEACH modeling included two different resolutions and data assimilation schemes. Findings to date on mean circulation, the nature of export from the southern Middle Atlantic Bight shelf, Gulf Stream variability, and position variability of the Hatteras Front are summarized, together with a look ahead to forthcoming analyses., We gratefully acknowledge NSF funding (OCE-1558920 to UNC-CH, OCE-1559476 to SkIO, OCE-1558521 to WHOI, OCE-1559178 to NCSU); technical support from Sara Haines, Craig Marquette, Trip Patterson, Nick DeSimone, Erran Sousa, Gabe Matthias, Patrick Deane, Brian Hogue, Frank Bahr, and Ben Hefner; cruise participants Jacob Forsyth, Joleen Heiderich, Chuxuan Li, Marco Valero, Lauren Ball, John McCord, and Kyle Maddux-Lawrence; and the crew of R/V Armstrong for their able support during three PEACH cruises.

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2014. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 41 (2014): 8935–8943, doi:10.1002/2014GL061357., Superstorm Sandy was a massive storm that impacted the U.S. East Coast on 22–31 October 2012, generating large waves, record storm surges, and major damage. The Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere-Wave-Sediment Transport modeling system was applied to hindcast this storm. Sensitivity experiments with increasing complexity of air-sea-wave coupling were used to depict characteristics of this immense storm as it underwent tropical to extratropical transition. Regardless of coupling complexity, model-simulated tracks were all similar to the observations, suggesting the storm track was largely determined by large-scale synoptic atmospheric circulation, rather than by local processes resolved through model coupling. Analyses of the sea surface temperature, ocean heat content, and upper atmospheric shear parameters showed that as a result of the extratropical transition and despite the storm encountering much cooler shelf water, its intensity and strength were not significantly impacted. Ocean coupling was not as important as originally thought for Sandy., Research support provided by USGS Coastal Process Project, NOAA grant NA11NOS0120033, and NASA grant NNX13AD80G is much appreciated., 2015-06-16