Performance of reanalysis and mesoscale models  off the coast of Hawai'i

Sheridan, Lindsay M.; Krishnamurthy, Raghavendra; Nguyen, Tien Manh; Chen, Yi-Leng; Gustafson Jr., William I.; Liu, Ye; Hsiao, Feng; Newsom, Rob K.; Spicer, Preston; Kassianov, Evgueni; Pekour, Mikhail; Bodini, Nicola; Severy, Mark

doi:10.5194/wes-11-2257-2026

Articles | Volume 11, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-11-2257-2026

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-11-2257-2026

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

Articles | Volume 11, issue 6

Research article

|

29 Jun 2026

Research article |

| 29 Jun 2026

Performance of reanalysis and mesoscale models off the coast of Hawai'i

Lindsay M. Sheridan, Raghavendra Krishnamurthy, Tien Manh Nguyen, Yi-Leng Chen, William I. Gustafson Jr., Ye Liu, Feng Hsiao, Rob K. Newsom, Preston Spicer, Evgueni Kassianov, Mikhail Pekour, Nicola Bodini, and Mark Severy

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Final revised paper (published on 29 Jun 2026)
Preprint (discussion started on 23 Sep 2025)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

RC1:
'Comment on wes-2025-167', Anonymous Referee #1, 17 Oct 2025

The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://wes.copernicus.org/preprints/wes-2025-167/wes-2025-167-RC1-supplement.pdf

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-2025-167-RC1
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Lindsay Sheridan, 09 Dec 2025
  
  Thank you so much for your thoughtful review and suggestions for improvement of our manuscript. Please find our responses to your helpful suggestions in the attachment.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-2025-167-AC1
RC2:
'Comment on wes-2025-167', Anonymous Referee #2, 17 Oct 2025

Please find my comments attached.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-2025-167-RC2
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Lindsay Sheridan, 09 Dec 2025
  
  We are grateful for your time and helpful suggestions for improving our manuscript. Please find our responses to your recommendations in the attachment.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-2025-167-AC2
- AC3: 'Reply on RC2', Lindsay Sheridan, 09 Dec 2025
  
  We are grateful for your time and helpful suggestions for improving our manuscript. Please find our responses to your recommendations in the attachment.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-2025-167-AC3

Peer review completion

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

AR by Lindsay Sheridan on behalf of the Authors (09 Dec 2025) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (16 Jan 2026) by Andrea Hahmann

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (19 Jan 2026)

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (20 Mar 2026)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I appreciate the large amount of work that the authors have done on the manuscript, which is much improved relative to the previous version. The analysis of the unusual or severe events that impacted the ‘unusual’ year of 2023 was very interesting.

However, the synthesis of the results and links between the sections needs to be improved, so that the manuscript doesn't read a collection of unconnected results. For example, the authors did some nice analysis showing the impact of turbulence intensity, wind shear, cloudiness, waves and ramps on the skill of the two datasets, but these results are probably all part of the same story of what scenarios are being poorly represented in the model.

Another inconsistency I can see is that that authors have decreased the wind energy focus of the paper in the introduction, but later in the manuscript, it reverts to being a wind-energy motivated paper, with discussion of power curves, the impact of wind shear on turbines etc. Perhaps if it’s not going to be explicitly a wind energy paper, then the results should be discussed in more general wind engineering terms (eg turbulence intensity is also an issue for other marine applications)

Minor comments:
Line 18: Less complex -> less complex than what?
Line 69: The sentence seems back to front. Should it be: “Kalverla et al. (2020) attributed underestimation of observed offshore wind ramps to ERA5’s horizontal resolution, due to ….”
Line 99: I guess it’s not really due to the concurrence of observations. Should it be something like “The concurrency of the observations and model estimates allows a detailed analysis of …”
Figure 9: Could you add (n=) to each category, to show how much data went into each set of bars?
Figure 16c: Why not add UHWRF and ERA5 to the pressure plot?

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ED: Reconsider after major revisions (22 Mar 2026) by Andrea Hahmann

AR by William Gustafson Jr. on behalf of the Authors (02 May 2026) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (15 May 2026) by Andrea Hahmann

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (21 May 2026) by Jakob Mann (Chief editor)

AR by William Gustafson Jr. on behalf of the Authors (27 May 2026) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

Wind simulations can contain significant errors, which can lead to inaccurate estimates of wind energy generation. Using observations from a floating lidar off Hawai'i, we hypothesize and establish that distinct simulation datasets will exhibit diverse ranges of errors in this offshore environment. The most commonly used simulation dataset produces the largest wind speed biases due to underestimation of fast wind speeds and misrepresentation of how wind speed varies throughout the day and night.