Next-generation hurricane forecast system

The Weather and Atmospheric Dynamics Group has begun a multi-year program to explore options for a next-generation hurricane track and intensity prediction system. This effort is supported by NOAA’s Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP).

he starting point for this effort is a an efficient high-resolution (approximately 25km) global atmospheric model that is capable of accurately simulating the climatology and inter-annual variability of tropical storms.  This tool is currently being extended in several directions to make it useful for operational forecasting.  these efforts involve initialization, model physics of special relevance to the hurricane scale, and variable mesh algorithms in the atmospheric model.  Specifically, current projects include

• Ensemble Kalman filter for hurricane prediction
• Coupling a surface wave model to a global atmospheric model
• Stretched and nested grids in the cubed-sphere atmospheric dynamical core

In addition, Morris Bender of GFDL is the co-lead of the Modeling Team within HFIP, while Tim Marchok of GFDL is the co-lead of the Verification Team.