the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Hurricane impacts in the United States East Coast offshore wind energy lease areas
Abstract. Wind turbines deployed in offshore wind energy lease areas along the U.S. East Coast could significantly contribute to the national electricity supply. This region is also impacted by powerful tropical and extra-tropical cyclones that may lead to high structural loading on wind turbines and support structures and, in the event of above cut-out wind speeds, low power production (capacity factors < 0.2). Four sets of high-resolution simulations are performed for two category 3 tropical cyclones that tracked close to current offshore wind energy lease areas to assess the possible impacts on, and from, wind turbines. Simulations of Hurricanes Irene and Sandy are performed at convective permitting resolution with both the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) and the Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere-Wave-Sediment Transport (COAWST) Model to characterize geophysical conditions of relevance to offshore wind turbines. These simulations are performed without and with a wind farm parameterization (WFP) active with the latter using the assumption that existing lease areas are fully populated with 15 MW wind turbines at a 1.85 km spacing. Many aspects (e.g., track, near-surface wind speed, sea level pressure, precipitation volumes) are well reproduced in control simulations (no WFP) with both WRF and COAWST particularly for Hurricane Sandy. COAWST simulations lead to more intense cyclones with a slightly larger area of storm-force wind speeds, a higher likelihood of hub-height wind speeds > 25 m s-1, plus higher precipitation volumes, possibly indicating under-estimation of hurricane risk in uncoupled simulations. All eight simulations indicate maximum hub-height wind speeds (HH WS) within the existing lease areas below 50 m s-1. However, COAWST simulations indicate frequent wind-wave misalignment of > 30° and the joint occurrence of significant wave height, hub-height wind speed, and wave period in some lease areas reach levels that are likely to be associated with large structural loads. This work re-emphasizes the utility of coupled simulations in describing geophysical conditions of relevance to offshore wind turbine operating conditions.
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Status: open (until 10 May 2025)
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RC1: 'Comment on wes-2025-37', Anonymous Referee #1, 04 Apr 2025
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The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://wes.copernicus.org/preprints/wes-2025-37/wes-2025-37-RC1-supplement.pdf
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RC2: 'Comment on wes-2025-37', Anonymous Referee #2, 17 Apr 2025
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This study is one of the first to use a coupled atmosphere-ocean-wave model to study the interactions between hurricanes and offshore wind turbines. I think this is very relevant as the deployment region is often subject to hurricanes. The research questions are very clear and are addressed by the results. However, I think the structure of the results section could be improved. In addition, the inclusion of a more recent roughness length parameterization of the wind wave alignment could strengthen the study's alignment with the stated research objectives.
Major comments:
One of the main objectives of this paper is to identify high wind wave misalgnments, which is essential for understanding structural loading. Therefore, I propose to use a wind-wave aware roughness length parameterization for a more accurate representation of this process. For example, Fu et al. (2023) show that including such a parameterization improves wind estimates, which I assume is important for this study. An alternative could be the parameterization presented by Porchetta et al. (2019), which has also shown improved hub height wind speeds compared to older schemes. Integrating either of these would likely increase the relevance and impact of the current work.
Fu, S., Huang, W., Luo, J., Yang, Z., Fu, H., Luo, Y., and Wang, B. (2023) Deep leaning-based sea surface roughness parameterization scheme improves sea surface wind forecast. Geophysical Research Letters, 50(24), e2023GL106580. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL106580
Porchetta, S., Temel, O., Munoz-Esparza, D., Reuder, J., Monbaliu, J., van Beeck, J. and van Lipzig, N. (2019) A new roughness length parameterization accounting for wind-wave (mis)alignment. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 19(10), 6681–6700. https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-6681-2019
It may be helpful to separate the results and discussion sections, as the current layout makes it difficult to follow. I also recommend improving the structure within the results section. It currently includes comparisons between two hurricanes, multiple models (WRF (WFP), COAWST (WFP)), and different parameters, which makes it dense and sometimes inconsistent. Consider focusing on the main results and moving supporting but non-essential material to the appendix. I also suggest rethinking the figures and their layout - while the content is valuable, the presentation makes it hard to digest. Emphasizing the differences between model results or including bias/RMSE metrics may improve clarity.
Minor comments:
Line 10: Please specify what is meant by "high resolution" in this context.
Line 13: Could you add the version numbers of the models used?
Figure 1: The figure is hard to interpret. The plots do not speak for themselves - please clarify what is being shown (e.g. sum or difference of precipitation) and make it more readable without relying solely on the caption.
Line 110: Could you explain why the wave boundary layer model was not used in your setup?
Table 2: Consider removing this table if it is not essential to the main results.
Line 240: It may be worthwhile to briefly mention the limitations or uncertainties of the evaluation data sets used.
Line 255: What is meant by "3x3 smoothing"? Please clarify.
Line 298: This section seems to mix results and discussion - consider separating them for better flow.
Line 300: The evaluation here is quite dense, with several variables and metrics presented at once. A clearer structure for comparisons would help.
Line 300: It's hard to see this clearly in Figure 1a. How is "fidelity" defined in this context?
Line 304: Can bias be quantified and presented in a table?
Line 313: What does "R18" refer to? Please define.
Lines 496-510: Could the observed changes in wind speed be related to differences in roughness length? This may be worth investigating as it may help explain some of the results.
Line 541: Should this be "except"?
Line 574: It is unclear which model setup provides better hurricane estimates - please clarify.
Line 590: Be consistent in terminology when referring to hurricanes versus cyclones.
Could input files be provided in order for others so that they can repeat the work if necessary.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-2025-37-RC2
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