Journal
NATURAL HAZARDS AND EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCES
Volume 14, Issue 8, Pages 2189-2201Publisher
COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH
DOI: 10.5194/nhess-14-2189-2014
Keywords
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Funding
- Hessian Initiative for the Development of Scientific and Economic Excellence (LOEWE) through Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre
- French GIS
- GMMC
- German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) [MiKliP: DECREG/01LP1118B]
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So-called medicanes (Mediterranean hurricanes) are meso-scale, marine, and warm-core Mediterranean cyclones that exhibit some similarities to tropical cyclones. The strong cyclonic winds associated with medicanes threaten the highly populated coastal areas around the Mediterranean basin. To reduce the risk of casualties and overall negative impacts, it is important to improve the understanding of medicanes with the use of numerical models. In this study, we employ an atmospheric limited-area model (COSMO-CLM) coupled with a one-dimensional ocean model (1-D NEMO-MED12) to simulate medicanes. The aim of this study is to assess the robustness of the coupled model in simulating these extreme events. For this purpose, 11 historical medicane events are simulated using the atmosphereonly model, COSMO-CLM, and coupled model, with different setups (horizontal atmospheric grid spacings of 0.44, 0.22, and 0.08 degrees; with/without spectral nudging, and an ocean grid spacing of 1/12 degrees). The results show that at high resolution, the coupled model is able to not only simulate most of medicane events but also improve the track length, core temperature, and wind speed of simulated medicanes compared to the atmosphere-only simulations. The results suggest that the coupled model is more proficient for systemic and detailed studies of historical medicane events, and that this model can be an effective tool for future projections.
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