The digital hurricane consortium: An adaptive mesonet to monitor wind, surge, wave, and rainfall intensities and damage at landfall

A major impediment to the advancement of Tropical Cyclone (TC) intensity forecasting and infrastructure damage mitigation is the void of data describing the near ground behavior of wind and water at the marine-coastal interface. The Digital Hurricane Consortium (DHC) is the newly formed umbrella organization that coordinates existing field deployment activities to collect and analyze wind, rain, storm surge and wave data via instrumented towers, mobile Doppler radars and surge/wave sensors. This coordination will produce an adaptive, event-driven observing system applied to the TC. Three-dimensional wind structure, precipitation, and surge/wave height will be collected at sub-kilometer resolution on time scales less than 1 min in the most severe region of the TC, and spanning from deep through shallow waters into surge inundated areas. A high-resolution surface intensity database will be created to assist modelers in prediction verification. These data will also be analyzed by a multi-disciplinary team of atmospheric scientists and wind/coastal engineers to investigate three areas: (1) air-sea momentum exchange/IBL formation, (2) wind-wave coupling and (3) mesoscale phenomena, such as eyewall mesovortices and rainband core downdrafts. The protection of coastal infrastructure from hurricane damage will be improved by this detailed quantification of the impinging forces.