Unveiling the pivotal influence of sea spray heat fluxes on hurricane rapid intensification

Abstract

Predicting rapid hurricane intensification remains a challenge, partially due to neglected factors like sea spray-mediated heat flux. To shed light on the specific roles of spray-mediated sensible and latent heat fluxes, we conducted sensitivity experiments with heat flux parameterizations. Our results demonstrate that the inclusion and variation of the spray-mediated sensible heat significantly reduce model errors when compared against dropsonde data. These findings uniquely quantify the pivotal role of spray-mediated sensible heat flux in accurately predicting hurricane rapid intensification compared to previous studies. Without sea spray processes, ocean-coupled model simulations could not reproduce the steep intensification rate observed in multi-case studies of four high-impact hurricanes. This study also highlights that dropsonde data, as well as directly observed flux, is useful in minimizing uncertainty in the flux parameterization used for hurricane simulations. In this paper, we show how spray-mediated heat flux affects hurricane energetics through turbulent heat exchange and subsequent humid air inflow through primary and secondary circulations. Our findings provide new insights into the transformative role of sea spray in turbulent heat exchange that drives rapid hurricane intensification.