P26     WRF explicit surface wave modeling experiments beneath Hurricane Florence (2018).

Zambon, Joe, Ruoying He, North Carolina State University - Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences, John C. Warner, United States Geological Survey (USGS), and Christie Hegermiller, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Hurricane Florence (2018) was a devastating storm that brought record-setting rainfall and flooding to the Carolinas.  Hurricanes are intrinsically connected to the coastal environment in which they translate and methods of incorporating ocean and surface wave feedback have previously been found to be essential in accurate prediction.  We utilize a suite of model simulations to investigate the impact of surface waves on storm characteristics through a variety of methods to incorporate explicit surface wave fields.  Several physics parameterizations to incorporate wave height, length, period, and direction have been implemented to modify surface fluxes resolved by the WRF model.  We also have developed methods to incorporate hindcast wave fields from the WaveWatch 3 surface wave model into the suite of WRF Preprocessing System (WPS) utilities for ingestion into the WRF model.  We examine the impacts of utilizing WaveWatch 3 hindcast surface wave fields as well as fully-coupled surface wave resolving experiments made possible with the Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere-Wave-Sediment Transport (COAWST) modeling system.