High resolution WRF simulation of Hurricane Sandy (2012) wind during landfall

A 96-hour high-resolution simulation of Hurricane Sandy was conducted using the Advanced Research version 3.3.1 of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model initialized at 1200 UTC 26 October 2012 (Johnsen et al., 2013) and using a horizontal resolution of 500 m. Domain size was 2,660x2,500 km with 150 vertical layers. The Yonsei University planetary boundary layer (PBL) scheme, the Noah land model, and the MM5 Monin-Obukhov similarity theory surface layer model were used. Cloud physics was modeled using WSM6 6-class microphysics with graupel. Convection parameterization was not used for this high-spatial-resolution simulation. National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Global Forecast System (GFS) analyses were used for initialization and boundary conditions, with the latter updated every 6 hours.

Data herein is a landfall-regime subset (Schiavone et al., 2016) of the full simulation. The spatial domain is 500x500 km containing the 50 lowest layers, with a time domain that spans the 12-hour period beginning at1200 UTC 29 October 2012 and with 3-hour time steps. Format is NetCDF containing detailed metadata. Three-dimensional meteorological field variables include the 3 wind components, potential temperature, water vapor mixing ratio, geopotential, and atmospheric pressure. Two-dimensional variables include horizontal wind components at 10 m AGL, potential temperature and water vapor mixing ratio at 2 m AGL, atmospheric pressure at the surface, terrain height, and the Coriolis sine latitude term, which is required to calculate potential vorticity.

These WRF simulation data were used, along with WSR-88D Doppler radar data and surface wind observations, to demonstrate that roll vortices occurred in the atmospheric boundary layer over the landfall region during Hurricane Sandy's landfall period (Schiavone et al., 2020).