[1] Semi-enclosed bays and estuaries are usually protected from hurricane-generated storm surges. When a hurricane travels on the land side, however, it may induce high storm surges, strong currents and destratification in the water column. Real-time observations and numerical model prediction both show a slab-like sloshing in Chesapeake Bay when it was hit by Hurricane Isabel in September 2003...

Tropical cyclones, which generate storm surges, wind waves, and flooding at landfall, are a major threat to human life and property in coastal regions throughout the world. The Unit‐ ed States, the northern Gulf of Mexico, and in particular the Louisiana Gulf coast, are very susceptible to the impacts of frequent tropical storms and hurricanes due to its tropical/ subtropical location and uniqu...

Analyzing insurance loss data we derive stochastic storm damage functions for residential buildings. On district level we fit power law relations between daily loss and maximum wind speed, typically spanning more than 4 orders of magnitude. The estimated exponents for 439 German districts roughly range from 8 to 12. In addition, we find correlations among the parameters and socio-demographic da...

Asymmetric structure of tropical cyclones simulated by the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory highresolution triply nested movable-mesh hurricane model was analyzed. Emphasis was placed on the quasi-steady component of the asymmetric structure in the region of the eyewall. It was found that the asymmetry was primarily caused by the relative wind, that is, the flow entering and leaving the st...

In winter of 2009–2010 south-western Europe was hit by several destructive windstorms. The most important was Xynthia (26–28 February 2010), which caused 64 reported casualties and was classified as the 2nd most expensive natural hazard event for 2010 in terms of economic losses. In this work we assess the synoptic evolution, dynamical characteristics and the main impacts of storm Xynthia, whos...

Ten years of data from the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission satellite’s Precipitation Radar (TRMM PR) show the vertical structure of tropical cyclone rainbands. Radar-echo statistics show that rainbands have a two-layered structure, with distinct modes separated by the melting layer. The ice layer is a combination of particles imported from the eyewall and ice left aloft as convective cell...

Predicting the future behavior of tropical cyclones is a problem of great importance for the atmospheric science community with concrete applications. Researchers understand enough about modeling storm systems to predict their track, but forecasting their future intensity remains elusive. In the present study, we formulate tropical storm intensification prediction as a supervised data mining pr...

In 1999, Typhoon 9918 struck Kyushu Island, which is located in Western Japan. During the strongest stage of the typhoon, the central pressure was 930 hPa and the maximum wind speed was 45 m/s near the center of the typhoon. The maximum storm tide was over 2 m along the coast of Kumamoto Prefecture on Kyushu Island. Due to the storm surges and wind waves, the typhoon caused enormous damage to m...

Winter storms are the most costly natural hazard for European residential property. We compare four distinct storm damage functions with respect to their forecast accuracy and variability, with particular regard to the most severe winter storms. The analysis focuses on daily loss estimates under differing spatial aggregation, ranging from district to country level. We discuss the broad and heav...

Based on in-situ time series data from an array of temperature sensors and an acoustic Doppler current profiler on the continental shelf of the northwestern South China Sea, a sequence of internal solitary waves (ISWs) were observed during the passage of tropical storm Washi in the summer of 2005, which provided a unique opportunity to investigate the ISW response to the tropical cyclone. The p...