Large Eddy Simulation of Non-stationary Hurricane Boundary Layer Winds

TL;DR

This paper develops a large eddy simulation model for hurricane boundary layer winds, accurately capturing wind speeds, turbulence, and spectral characteristics, validated against real hurricane data to improve infrastructure resilience modeling.

Contribution

A novel LES hurricane boundary layer model incorporating meso-scale kinematic and thermodynamic variations, validated with field data, enhancing hurricane wind prediction accuracy.

Findings

Simulated wind speeds closely match observed data.

Model effectively predicts turbulence intensities.

Wind spectrum simulations agree with measurements.

Abstract

Recent extreme tropical cyclones caused extensive damages to critical civil infrastructure globally. To better capture the unique hurricane wind characteristics, a large eddy simulation (LES) Hurricane Boundary Layer (HBL) model is developed by considering the variation of meso-scale kinematic and thermodynamic conditions. An asymmetric model is adopted to obtain the gradient wind velocity using the National Hurricane Center data. The meso-scale thermal conditions are obtained by extracting the hourly air temperature and relative humidity profiles from generated proxy soundings. Measurements recorded at the Aransas County airport during Hurricane Harvey and that at the City of Naples during Irma are used to validate the developed LES model. Research results show that the simulated 10-minute average wind speed and direction are consistent with the observations. The developed model can well predict the high wind turbulences, which are around 20% in Hurricane Harvey and 26% in Hurricane Irma. The 3-s gust wind speeds reach 62.4 m/s at 10-m elevation during Hurricane Harvey and 53.5 m/s at 15-m elevation during Hurricane Irma, close to the field observed data of 61.3 m/s and 54.2 m/s, respectively. The simulated 3-s gust factors are close to the observation except at some moments with significant variations because of the poorly understood physical phenomena. The simulated wind spectrum in longitudinal and lateral directions agrees well with the observed results. In summary, the developed LES-based HBL model can capture the main characteristics of hurricane structure and turbulence characteristics and is applicable for modeling civil infrastructure exposed to hurricanes.