Observations and modeling of ocean response to Hurricane Edouard (2014)

Principal Investigator:

• Eric W. Uhlhorn (HRD)

Project Members:

• Joseph J. Cione (HRD)
• George R. Halliwell (PhOD/- CIMAS)

Dr. Ligia Bernardet (NOAA/ESRL/GSD and CIRES)

Dr. Lynn K. (Nick) Shay (University of Miami/RSMAS)

Dr. Benjamin Jaimes (University of Miami/RSMAS)

Funded partly under the 2013 Disaster Relief Appropriations Act (Sandy Supplimental)

• Obtain comprehensive observations of temperature, salinity, and currents in a hurricane envrionment
  • Aircraft missions and data
• Analyze the three-dimensional structure and evolution of the upper ocean in response to the directly observed surface wind forcing
• Evaluate the ocean component of current and future coupled hurricane forecast models based on observational analyses

• Collected over 150 vertical profiles of ocean temperature, salinity, and currents from several aircraft flights in Hurricane Edouard (09/2014)
• Quality controlled temperature and salinity profiles publically available (12/2014)
• Observational analyses
  • Sea surface temperature (1/2015)
  • Surface winds (2/2015)
  • Surface thermodynamical fields (2/2015)

• Ocean profile data
• Surface wind field analyses