New Publication by Graduate Student and Prof. Guimond

Dr. Steve Guimond, his graduate student Badrul Hasan (UMBC, Department of Mechanical Engineering) and collaborators have published a fundamental paper on the computational physics of the hurricane rapid intensification process in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES). This paper demonstrates that the models used by the atmospheric physics community (e.g., Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and its variants, such as NU-WRF) contain significant numerical dissipation that limits their use for accurately predicting hurricane rapid intensification and other nonlinear dynamical systems. The kinetic energy associated with convective bursts, the primary mechanism for heat transfer, is diminished in WRF, which leads to a weaker system-scale intensification through the upscale transfer of kinetic energy. These results can have potentially important consequences for operational forecasts, especially the rapid intensification process. For example, the under-prediction or low bias of rapid intensification forecasts may be partly due to excessive numerical dissipation. 

Hasan, M.B., S.R. Guimond, M. Yu, S. Reddy and F.X. Giraldo (2022), The effects of numerical dissipation on hurricane rapid intensification with observational heating, Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021MS002897.