65th IHC Booklet/Program (pdf - 4.9MB) - Office of the Federal ...

Advancements to the Operational HWRF Modeling System at EMC
Vijay Tallapragada
(vijay.tallapragada@noaa.gov)
NOAA/NWS/NCEP/EMC/HWRF
The National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)/Environmental Modeling Center
(EMC) operational Hurricane Weather Research and Forecast (HWRF) modeling system has
been upgraded for implementation in 2011 hurricane season. Through a collaborative effort,
EMC and the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) have upgraded the non-hydrostatic
mesoscale model (NMM) core of the HWRF system from V2.0 and synchronized it with the
latest version of WRF NMM V3.2+, allowing the operational and research communities to share
the same code base and help accelerate further advancements to the HWRF modeling system
through an efficient Research to Operations (R2O) infrastructure. Developmental activities for
the HWRF system for 2011 hurricane season also included improvements to the vortex
initialization procedure, new GFS deep convection parameterization, improved surface physics
formulation, expanded Princeton Ocean Model (POM) Eastern Atlantic domain and enhanced
hurricane model diagnostics designed to identify areas for improvement.
The coupled HWRF system was uniquely designed to make significant advancements in
improving operational forecast skill of intensity and structure forecasts in addition to advancing
wave and storm surge forecasts to address the coastal inundation problem. Continued
advancements in track prediction will remain an important focus of this prediction system.
Further improvements to the HWRF modeling system is being made possible through the
support provided by the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP). Accelerating
advancements in hurricane prediction will require an infusion of resources directed at
concentrating vital modeling efforts at NCEP in the areas of model resolution, advanced triple
nested grids, improved air-sea-wave-land coupling, advanced hurricane physics suitable for
higher resolutions, improved data assimilation methods to ingest new and existing datasets in the
hurricane core, and high resolution HWRF ensembles to account for uncertainties in the initial
state and physics.
Session 5 – Page 1