Office of Atmospheric Research's (OAR) Hurricane Modeling Program ¶
Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP) is a unified National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) approach to guide and accelerate improvements in intensity forecasts with an emphasis on rapid intensity (RI) change. The Weather Research Forecasting Model (WRF) is a general purpose, multi-institutional mesoscale modeling system. A version of the WRF-Non-Hydrostatic Mesoscale Model (NMM), called the Hurricane Weather Research and Forecast (HWRF) developed at the National Center for Environmental Protection (NCEP) for hurricane forecasting is presently being ported to the Developmental Test Bed Center (DTC) at Boulder to facilitate the HFIP hurricane research modeling activities. The system is dubbed as the Hurricane Research System (HRS) and it is the research version of the WRF-NMM system. It is composed of an atmospheric model using the WRF-NMM core as ported over to DTC from operations, updated to run with the latest WRF enhancements (V3.0x, WPS, etc.). This model is being advanced at the Office of Atmospheric Research (OAR) to address the HFIP goals of understanding and accelerating improvements in tropical cyclone forecasts.
The Finite-Volume Flow-Following Icosahedral Numerical Weather Prediction model (FIM) model is a developed at Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) / GSD and Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL)
/ PSD. FIM has been run in real-time at a resolution of 30 km since
March 2008 at ESRL, and was transferred successfully to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)
in August to enable a 15-km version to run in real-time, as well as a
30-km ensemble of FIM runs initialized off the GFS ensemble set. Thus,
FIM has been used to forecast tropical storms in at least part of the
2008 hurricane season. It would be highly desirable to redo all of the
2008 hurricane 15-km deterministic model runs, and include the
high-resolution test suite being studied by the DTC as well. We should
also run 30-km ensembles for all these cases, and perhaps also do some
15-km ensembles with FIM. Doing so will help accelerate the ability to
attain an Initial Operating Capability for a National Global Ensemble
Forecast System (NUOPC) before 2010. Software and systems engineering
support will be required to achieve this at GSD.
