Abstract High spatial and temporal resolution wind forcing is essential to capture the highly variable atmospheric circulation driving ocean currents in shallow waters and across complex coastal features in the Mississippi Sound. In this study, we examine the sensitivity of modeled hydrodynamics to sea‐land breeze (SLB) circulation. Two versions of the CONCORDE Meteorological Analysis (CMA) wind fields were applied as forcing in the COAWST‐based model: an hourly 1‐km resolution data set and a 24‐hr low‐pass filtered version of this data set (CMA24). Inter‐comparison of the resulting solutions isolates the impact of diurnal SLB circulation. Our analysis demonstrates that removing diurnal, SLB‐dominated wind variability modifies circulation patterns and impacts the heat exchange between the atmosphere and estuarine‐shelf waters within the Mississippi Sound. This study estimates its contribution to summer latent heat flux to be 18 W/m2. These results underscore the importance of high‐resolution atmospheric forcing for representing coastal ocean dynamics in modeling applications.