Ocean surface waves play a significant role in regulating the sea surface temperature and mixed layer depth, which are essential for accurate prediction of tropical cyclone (TC) intensity. The effects of wave breaking and wave orbital motion induced mixing on the TC intensity and size are investigated using a coupled ocean‐atmosphere‐wave model for both idealized and real TC cases. The results show that both wave breaking and wave orbital motion lead to greater sea surface temperature cooling and mixed layer deepening, resulting in decreases in TC intensity and size owing to the reduction of air‐sea heat fluxes. Wave orbital motion has a slightly greater effect than wave breaking on the TC intensity and size when the mixed layer is shallow, whereas it has a much greater effect when the mixed layer is deep. In addition, including wave orbital motion induced mixing in models can effectively reduce the error in simulated TC size.

Wind-generated ocean surface waves give rise to a near-surface velocity known as Stokes drift (SD) (Stokes, 1847), which can contribute substantially to near-surface mass transport. SD is widely applied in representation of nearshore circulation in coastal zones and in modeling of tracer transport as the difference between Lagrangian and Eulerian averages, and it is responsible for the Coriolis-Stokes force in the upper-ocean layer in Eulerian models (van den Bremer & Breivik, 2018). It has been shown that wave-induced water transport due to SD can affect a wide range of ocean states in dramatic ways (Hasselmann, 1971). The magnitude of SD can reach the same as that of wind transport in high-and mid-latitude oceans (McWilliams & Restrepo, 1999;Shi et al., 2016). Tamura et al. (2012) proposed that SD plays an important role in the momentum balance of the upper ocean through introduction into the average Eulerian flow. Moreover, SD also influences the mixed layer of the ocean by causing Langmuir turbulence generation (McWilliams et al., 2014).