Intense windstorms in the northeastern United States

Letson, Frederick W.; Barthelmie, Rebecca J.; Hodges, Kevin I.; Pryor, Sara C.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-21-2001-2021

Articles | Volume 21, issue 7

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-21-2001-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-21-2001-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 21, issue 7

Research article

|

02 Jul 2021

Research article |

| 02 Jul 2021

Intense windstorms in the northeastern United States

Frederick W. Letson, Rebecca J. Barthelmie, Kevin I. Hodges, and Sara C. Pryor

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Final revised paper (published on 02 Jul 2021)
Preprint (discussion started on 11 Dec 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Revision to Letson et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 07 Jan 2021
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Frederick Letson, 18 Feb 2021
RC2: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #2, 15 Jan 2021
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Frederick Letson, 18 Feb 2021

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (19 Feb 2021) by Joaquim G. Pinto

AR by Frederick Letson on behalf of the Authors (22 Feb 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (23 Feb 2021) by Joaquim G. Pinto

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (30 Mar 2021)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (02 Apr 2021)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Second review of “Intense windstorms in the Northeastern United States” by Frederick Letson, Rebecca J. Barthelmie, Kevin I. Hodges and Sara C. Pryor

The paper has improved in clarity and the comprehensive methods are now better explained, although they sometimes appear inconsistent but are somehow justified by the results. Altogether most of my previous concerns have been addressed. However, besides a few minor issues, I am still not convinced by a systematic link between the extent of extreme winds and property damage. Comments are listed below to further improve the paper.

General comment

I appreciate the comparison between 100m wind and 10m gust as well as between U999 and U98 and between extent and severity. I believe this is sufficient to document the approach to select windstorms but I suggest the authors should not try to prove it works in general. Several events involve intense precipitation and #1 event Hurricane Sandy further involves a storm surge thus wind alone will not explain the exceptional damage. This is discussed in the paper but rather late in the results whereas it appears obvious and contradicts the methodology of considering both wind and precipitation to account for compound events.

Detailed comments

l. 32 “it” experiences: the region?

l. 40, 42, 44 repetition of “lee of Rocky Mountains”

l. 45 “these”: which ones?

l. 65–70 this is still very debated!

l. 232 why use a much shorter period for precipitation than wind?

l. 301 layout issue

l. 306–307 confusing: per definition U999 is exceeded during 0,1% of hours

l. 338–344 and compound events involving storm surge and intense precipitation

l. 344–349 these statistics are not too impressive and likely biased by the presence of an outlier (Sandy) within the 10 events

l. 400–403 see comment on l. 338–344

l. 457–459 repetition of l. 392–297

l. 459–461 largely due to a storm surge

l. 510 typo: Great Lakes “1”

l. 544–546 see comment on l. 338–344

Tables: it takes some effort to identify the storms mentioned in the text as YYYY as they are written in the tables as MM/DD/YY and not listed chronologically

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ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (14 Apr 2021) by Joaquim G. Pinto

AR by Frederick Letson on behalf of the Authors (27 Apr 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (07 May 2021) by Joaquim G. Pinto

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (11 May 2021)

ED: Publish as is (12 May 2021) by Joaquim G. Pinto

Post-review adjustments

AA: Author's adjustment | EA: Editor approval

AA by Frederick Letson on behalf of the Authors (24 Jun 2021) Author's adjustment Manuscript

EA: Adjustments approved (24 Jun 2021) by Joaquim G. Pinto

Short summary

Windstorms during the last 40 years in the US Northeast are identified and characterized using the spatial extent of extreme wind speeds at 100 m height from the ERA5 reanalysis. During all of the top 10 windstorms, wind speeds exceeding the local 99.9th percentile cover at least one-third of the land area in this high-population-density region. These 10 storms followed frequently observed cyclone tracks but have intensities 5–10 times the mean values for cyclones affecting this region.