@article{200031,
  author = {Nicolas Bruneau and Ralf Toumi and Shuai Wang},
  title = {Impact of wave whitecapping on land falling tropical cyclones},
  abstract = { Predicting tropical cyclone structure and evolution remains challenging. Particularly, the surface wave interactions with the continental shelf and their impact on tropical cyclones have received very little attention. Through a series of state-of-the-art high-resolution, fully-coupled ocean-wave and atmosphere-ocean-wave experiments, we show here, for the first time, that in presence of continental shelf waves can cause substantial cooling of the sea surface. Through whitecapping there is a transfer of momentum from the surface which drives deeper vertical mixing. It is the waves and not just the wind which become the major driver of stratified coastal ocean ahead-of-cyclone cooling. In the fully-coupled atmosphere-ocean-wave model a negative feedback is found. The maximum wind speed is weaker and the damaging footprint area of hurricane-force winds is reduced by up to 50\% due to the strong wave induced ocean cooling ahead. Including wave-ocean coupling is important to improve land falling tropical cyclone intensity predictions for the highly populated and vulnerable coasts. },
  year = {2018},
  journal = {Scientific Reports},
  volume = {8},
  pages = {652},
  month = {12/2018},
  issn = {2045-2322},
  url = {http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-19012-3},
  doi = {10.1038/s41598-017-19012-3},
  language = {eng},
}