Assessing North Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Rainfall Hazard Using Engineered-Synthetic Storms and a Physics-Based Tropical Cyclone Rainfall Model

Journal Article · 01 August 2023 · Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1175/jamc-d-22-0131.1 · OSTI ID:2425589

Xi, Dazhi ^[1]; Lin, Ning ^[1]; Nadal-Caraballo, Norberto C. ^[2]; Yawn, Madison C. ^[2]

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1. Princeton University, NJ (United States)
2. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Vicksburg, MS (United States)

In this study, we design a statistical method to couple observations with a physics-based tropical cyclone (TC) rainfall model (TCR) and engineered-synthetic storms for assessing TC rainfall hazard. We first propose a bias-correction method to minimize the errors induced by TCR via matching the probability distribution of TCR-simulated historical TC rainfall with gauge observations. Then we assign occurrence probabilities to engineered-synthetic storms to reflect local climatology, through a resampling method that matches the probability distribution of a newly proposed storm parameter named rainfall potential (POT) in the synthetic dataset with that in the observation. POT is constructed to include several important storm parameters for TC rainfall such as TC intensity, duration, and distance and environmental humidity near landfall, and it is shown to be correlated with TCR-simulated rainfall. The proposed method has a satisfactory performance in reproducing the rainfall hazard curve in various locations in the continental United States; it is an improvement over the traditional joint probability method (JPM) for TC rainfall hazard assessment.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC)
• Grant/Contract Number: SC0014664
• OSTI ID: 2425589
• Journal Information: Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, Journal Name: Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology Journal Issue: 8 Vol. 62; ISSN 1558-8424
• Publisher: American Meteorological SocietyCopyright Statement
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English