Enhancement of Cruise Boat Resilience to Strong Convective Gusts with Global Model Cumulus Variable Prediction

Abstract

Ship pilots and maritime safety administration have an urgent need for more accurate and earlier warnings for strong wind gusts. This study firstly investigated the “Oriental Star” cruise ship capsizing event in 2015, one of the deadliest shipwreck events in recent years, and explored all related hydro-meteorological components in a global mesoscale model. It was found that rather than the missing signal in raw surface-wind prediction, the cumulus precipitation variable (CP) increased dramatically during the accident occurrence, which significantly corresponds to a sub-grid strong wind gust. The effective lead time could be extended from 24 h (deterministic model) to 48 h (ensemble model). This finding was then verified in another two recent deadly cruise boat accidents. The introduction of the new variable aims to improve the current maritime safeguard system in predicting sub-grid strong wind gusts for small-sized cruise boats offshore and in inland rivers. Finally, an automatic response system was developed to provide economical convection prediction via INMARSAT email communication, aiming to explore operational severe convective gust early warning and appropriate numerical mesoscale model applications.