Advancing the State of the Art in Operational Tropical Cyclone Forecasting at Ncep

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Regional Hurricane modeling systems developed and implemented into operations at National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Weather Service (NWS) are now used for tropical cyclone forecast guidance in all ocean basins of the world. Lately, HWRF (Hurricane Weather Research and Forecast) modeling system has made significant improvements to the state of the art in numerical guidance for tropical cyclone track, intensity, size, structure and rainfall forecasts. These improvements come from advances in various components of the modeling system that are incorporated into the model in yearly upgrade cycles.NWS/NCEP/Environmental Modeling Center’s hurricane team has also developed another non-hydrostatic hurricane model in NOAA Environmental Modeling System (NEMS) framework known as HMON (Hurricanes in a Multi-scale Ocean-coupled Non-hydrostatic) model which was implemented at NCEP operations this past year. Development of HMON is consistent with, and a step closer to developing Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS) chosen Finite Volume Cubed-Sphere (FV3) dynamic core based global to local scale coupled models in a unified modeling framework. In this paper, operational configuration details of this new HMON model are discussed along with operational HWRF model upgrades, and their forecast performance is compared to other models. We also discuss plans for hurricane model improvements in the next two to five years. Keywords: operational models, forecasting, tropical cyclones