Impact of Urban Representation on Simulation of Hurricane Rainfall

Abstract

Taking the examples of Hurricane Florence (2018) over the Carolinas and Hurricane Harvey (2017) over the Texas Gulf Coast, the study attempts to understand the performance of slab, single-layer Urban Canopy Model (UCM), and Building Environment Parameterization (BEP) in simulating hurricane rainfall using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. The WRF model simulations showed that for an intense, large-scale event such as a hurricane, the model quantitative precipitation forecast over the urban domain was sensitive to the model urban physics. The spatial and temporal verification using the modified Kling-Gupta efficiency and Method for Object based Diagnostic and Evaluation in Time Domain suggests that UCM performance is superior to the BEP scheme. Additionally, using the BEP urban physics scheme over UCM for landfalling hurricane rainfall simulations has helped simulate heavy rainfall hotspots.