Fully coupled, high-resolution atmosphere–ocean–wave simulations of the offshore wind energy environment during Hurricane Henri (2021)

Jung, Chunyong; Xue, Pengfei; Huang, Chenfu; Pringle, William; Biswas, Mrinal; Nain, Geeta; Wang, Jiali

doi:10.5194/wes-11-1321-2026

Articles | Volume 11, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-11-1321-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-11-1321-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 11, issue 4

Research article

|

22 Apr 2026

Research article |

| 22 Apr 2026

Fully coupled, high-resolution atmosphere–ocean–wave simulations of the offshore wind energy environment during Hurricane Henri (2021)

Chunyong Jung, Pengfei Xue, Chenfu Huang, William Pringle, Mrinal Biswas, Geeta Nain, and Jiali Wang

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Final revised paper (published on 22 Apr 2026)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 27 Mar 2025)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

RC1:
'Comment on wes-2025-47', Anonymous Referee #1, 08 Apr 2025

Attached.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-2025-47-RC1
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Chunyong Jung, 23 Jul 2025
  
  The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://wes.copernicus.org/preprints/wes-2025-47/wes-2025-47-AC1-supplement.pdf
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-2025-47-AC1
RC2:
'Comment on wes-2025-47', Anonymous Referee #2, 15 Jun 2025
Review of ”Fully Coupled High-Resolution Atmosphere-Ocean-Wave Simulations of Hurricane Henri (2021): Implications for Offshore Load Assessments”
This study investigates the effects of using different combinations of COAWST modeling components on the simulated Hurricane structure: Atmosphere only, Atmosphere-Ocean, and Atmosphere-Ocean-Wave. Various measurements are used to validate the results, and help to interpret the mechanisms of the interactions between atmosphere, wave and ocean. It also discusses the relevance to the calculation of loads for offshore wind turbines
The paper is well written, with clear research questions, reasonable methodology, convincing presentation of results and analysis. I recommend the paper Minor Revision, with the following comments and suggestions.
Sec 2.1, line 132: it is written that “we have modified the WRF code to enable…”. How does this work with the SWAN model? Isn’t the Taylor-Yelland roughness length algorithms included in SWAN?

Sec 3.1, line 198: “a resolution of 4 km or less is adequately convection-permitting in WRF for simulating extreme events” – what do you mean “adequate”?

The paragraph starting from line 200 seems to be about the ocean modeling. Yet the last sentence seems to belong to the atmospheric modeling, or does it?

Fig 3: many figures, including this one, miss x and y-axes labels. Please add all of them.

Fig 3: What is the temporal resolution of the Best Track data in Fig 3b? What are the heights of winds from the modeling in Fig 3c?

Fig 4: Did the authors explain why the two time are chosen for the analysis? What about other time? Please add Unit to the color bars – not only to this figure but to all figures.

Fig 7: The profiles in this figure, is it an average over a certain period or is it a snapshot on the day?

Fig 10a: add legend. Fig 10e and f: do you think the difference between wind and wave directions is caused by swell? What is the model’s ability in capturing swell?

Please make sure all figures have axes labels, legends and color bars with units.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-2025-47-RC2
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Chunyong Jung, 23 Jul 2025
  
  The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://wes.copernicus.org/preprints/wes-2025-47/wes-2025-47-AC2-supplement.pdf
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-2025-47-AC2

Peer review completion

AR – Author's response | RR – Referee report | ED – Editor decision | EF – Editorial file upload

AR by Chunyong Jung on behalf of the Authors (31 Jul 2025) Author's response

EF by Lorena Grabowski (04 Aug 2025) Manuscript Author's tracked changes

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (17 Oct 2025) by Sandrine Aubrun

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (05 Nov 2025)

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (05 Dec 2025)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The article presents a newly developed coupled atmosphere-wave-ocean model that has been tested in a single Hurricane case at the US East Coast. The authors motivate their topic and choice of journal with the load and structural vulnerabilities exhibited by turbines during tropical cyclones, mainly due to wind-wave misalignment. This article is mainly an introduction to the new coupled modeling system, along with a case-study validation for extreme conditions. As such, it could have fitted in other Copernicus journals such as Geoscientific Model Development. However, it also falls within the broad topic of "wind and the atmosphere" and "fluid mechanics", and thus a publication in WES can be justified.

Overall, the manuscript is well written and logically structured. A variety of observational data types are utilized to evaluate the performance of the simulations. In total, three different scenarios are tested: atmosphere-only, atmosphere-ocean-coupled, and atmosphere-wave-ocean-coupled (AWO). The validations indicate that AWO performs best, although it still exhibits some deviations from the observations, particularly when compared to the best-track data.

I recommend publication of this article after minor revisions.

Minor revisions
- line 138: 46 vertical levels seem to be rather coarse, considering that 12 of them are below 100 m and the hurricane stretches all the way to the tropopause. Can you show a plot of the levels, and have you checked the sensitivity of your results to the number of model levels?
- line 155: Which period do you discard as spin-up time? You mention that SWAN is started from a quiescent state, thus it would need some time to spin up. Also, WRF is known to not perform well in the first couple of hours. How do you initialize FVCOM? Ocean models usually require a long spin-up time. Did you check that?
- Code and data availability: While it is difficult to share the simulation results due to storage, the setup files of the different models, WRF, SWAN, FVCOM, and their coupling can be shared more easily. The same goes for the analysis scripts to reproduce the table and plots. I suggest putting those on Zenodo to make the study better reproducible. Please also add the repository for the coupler. Is the coupled modeling system that you developed publicly available?

Technical corrections
- There are some typos, e.g. l 171 "fro" -> "for", line 408 double ".", line 469 "therodymaic" -> "thermodynamic". Careful revision of the entire manuscript regarding this is needed.
- There are some double words, e.g. line 242 "To To .." and line 252 "This This ...". Here also a check of the entire manuscript is also needed
- S1 is never explicitly mentioned. Please add a reference add an appropriate place or remove it from the Supplementary material.
- Figure 3 is too wide for the page; I cannot see the legend of Figure (d) properly. I suggest adding the dropsonde positions to (a) and then making it bigger. This also makes it easier to compare the dropsonde locations to the deviating tracks of the simulations compared to the best-track data
- Line 297 mentions S3 explicitly
- Figure 7 covers a big domain, bigger than the area that is analysed in the remaining article. With this zoom level, it is difficult to see the details around the track. I suggest zooming to 20°N and 60°W-90°W at least to make it easier to compare. Still larger-scale features are visible
- Figure 8: Sub-figure title of figure (b) - (g) is too small

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (28 Jan 2026) by Sandrine Aubrun

AR by Chunyong Jung on behalf of the Authors (13 Feb 2026) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (02 Mar 2026) by Sandrine Aubrun

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (17 Mar 2026) by Jakob Mann (Chief editor)

AR by Chunyong Jung on behalf of the Authors (17 Mar 2026) Manuscript

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Short summary

We developed a new modeling system that combines air, ocean, and wave processes to better understand hurricanes. Using Hurricane Henri as a test case, we found that including ocean and wave interactions improves the accuracy of storm intensity and wind patterns. These results show that accounting for these interactions is important for assessing risks to offshore energy systems and coastal regions.