Hurricane impacts in the United States East Coast offshore wind energy lease areas

Thompson, Kelsey B.; Barthelmie, Rebecca J.; Pryor, Sara C.

doi:10.5194/wes-10-2639-2025

Articles | Volume 10, issue 11

https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-10-2639-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-10-2639-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 10, issue 11

Research article

|

17 Nov 2025

Research article |

| 17 Nov 2025

Hurricane impacts in the United States East Coast offshore wind energy lease areas

Kelsey B. Thompson, Rebecca J. Barthelmie, and Sara C. Pryor

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-10-2639-2025-supplement

Data sets

Hurricane impacts in the U.S. East Coast offshore wind energy lease areas Kelsey B. Thompson et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14895862

Model code and software

COAWST United States Geological Survey https://github.com/DOI-USGS/COAWST

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Short summary

Wind turbines in offshore lease areas (LAs) along the eastern US may be impacted by hurricanes. Regional simulations with atmosphere-only and coupled atmosphere–ocean–wave regional models reproduce historical hurricanes well and indicate no exceedance of 50 m s^-1 wind speeds in the LAs and only brief periods with low power production. Coupled simulations lead to more intense hurricanes, possibly indicating that previous atmosphere-only simulations underestimate the risk to offshore wind turbines.