A Revised Model for Radial Profiles of Hurricane Winds

Abstract

A revision to the Holland parametric approach to modeling the radial profile of winds in hurricanes is presented. The approach adopted uses information readily available from hurricane archives or in hurricane warning information and the profile can be readily incorporated into existing parametric models of the hurricane surface wind field. The original model utilized central and environmental surface pressures, maximum winds, and radius of maximum winds. In the revision a capacity to incorporate additional wind observations at some radius within the hurricane circulation was included. If surface observations are used, then a surface wind profile will result, obviating the need for deriving a boundary layer reduction from the gradient wind level. The model has considerably less sensitivity to data errors compared to the original and is shown to reproduce hurricane reconnaissance and surface wind profiles with high accuracy.