Observations and Simulations of the Winds at a Bridge in Hong Kong during Two Tropical Cyclone Events in 2023

The impact of tropical cyclones on the operation of bridges and railways are mostly dependent on the forecast wind speed trend (upward, downward or staying steady) at present in Hong Kong. There are requests to forecast the exceedance of wind speed thresholds for such operations with a lead time of many hours ahead. This study considers the technical feasibility of forecasting the wind speed along a recently built bridge in Hong Kong with a coupled mesoscale numerical weather prediction (NWP)–computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. This bridge features numerous anemometers where the coupled model can be verified. It is found that these two tropical cyclone cases are very challenging, especially in representing the wind structure of the cyclone because of its relatively small circulation. As such, the timing of the maximum wind could be 2 to 4 h earlier than the actual observation. The maximum wind speed from CFD modeling could be higher than that from the NWP model alone by 5 to 10 m/s, which shows that CFD modeling could add value in the forecasting of wind speed exceedance, although the maximum simulated value is still lower than the actual observation by as much as 10 m/s. As a result, while the general wind speed trend may be forecast, the exceedance of definite values of wind speed limits is still practically rather challenging, given the present two cases of tropical cyclones.