Given the significant damage that hurricanes can cause every year, accurate forecasts of these extreme weather events are crucial. Ocean warming can substantially impact the intensity and track of hurricanes in the future. Forecasting the track of hurricanes is typically more challenging than intensity predictions since tracks are influenced not only by hurricane vortex dynamics but also by global and synoptic weather systems (i.e., environmental flow). The dynamical mechanisms that modulate hurricane trajectories under changes in the surface temperature and friction are not comprehensively established yet. The primary objective of this paper is to address this knowledge gap by conducting six real hurricanes and some non-hurricane simulations using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. In total, 90 WRF simulations are carried out to characterize the impacts of varying the surface temperature and drag on hurricane tracks and their relationship with environmental flow patterns. It is found that ocean warming tends to intensify hurricanes by ∼20 % and decrease their azimuthal translational velocity, and vice versa when the surface is cooled. Hurricanes move more towards the west over the Atlantic Ocean when the surface temperature is decreased and vice versa. This was shown to be due to the changes in the average azimuthal speed of environmental flows. Increasing the surface temperature, destabilizes the atmosphere, and increases the surface friction velocity. Hence, increased surface friction appears to slow down the environmental flow and consequently hurricane track azimuthal translational speed. This finding was confirmed by another suite of simulations in which only the surface roughness length of the low-wind environmental flow regime was altered. It was shown that surface drag changes have a similar impact on hurricane tracks as surface temperature variations. Decreasing the default surface drag for low-wind regimes tends to further move the hurricanes toward the west and vice versa. This paper provides notable insights into future hurricane track trends and the role of ocean temperature and momentum exchange coefficients in hurricane track and environmental flow patterns. Moreover, the results of this study can be useful for advancing surface layer parameterizations and their impacts on hurricane track forecasts in weather/climate models.

鉴于飓风每年都会造成重大损失，对这些极端天气事件的准确预报至关重要。海洋变暖可能会严重影响未来飓风的强度和路径。预测飓风路径通常比强度预测更具挑战性，因为路径不仅受到飓风涡动态的影响，而且还受到全球和天气系统（即环境流）的影响。在表面温度和摩擦力变化下调节飓风轨迹的动力学机制尚未完全建立。本文的主要目标是通过使用天气研究和预报 (WRF) 模型进行六场真实飓风和一些非飓风模拟，以弥补这一知识差距。总共进行了 90 次 WRF 模拟，以表征不同的表面温度和阻力对飓风路径的影响及其与环境流动模式的关系。研究发现，海洋变暖往往会使飓风增强约 20%，并降低其方位角平移速度，当表面冷却时反之亦然。当表面温度降低时，飓风会在大西洋上空向西移动，反之亦然。这被证明是由于环境流的平均方位角速度的变化造成的。增加表面温度，使大气不稳定，并增加表面摩擦速度。因此，增加的表面摩擦力似乎会减慢环境流动，从而减慢飓风轨迹的方位平移速度。这一发现得到了另一组模拟的证实，其中仅改变了低风环境流态的表面粗糙度长度。结果表明，表面阻力变化对飓风路径的影响与表面温度变化类似。减少低风状况的默认表面阻力往往会使飓风进一步向西移动，反之亦然。本文提供了对未来飓风路径趋势以及海洋温度和动量交换系数在飓风路径和环境流动模式中的作用的重要见解。此外，这项研究的结果可用于推进表层参数化及其对天气/气候模型中飓风路径预报的影响。