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

Issues in transitioning HWRF upgrades into operations at EMC
A Joint Hurricane Testbed (JHT) Program
Robert E. Tuleya, Young Kwon, Vijay Tallapragada,
Zhan Zhang, Yihua Wu, Qingfu Liu, and J. O’Connor
(Robert.tuleya@noaa.gov)
CCPO/ODU
The 2010-2011 JHT project funded through the Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography (CCPO)
at Old Dominion University (ODU) has concentrated on HWRF development, its operational
implementation, and recent upgrades. Over the last year emphasis on this project has been on trouble
shooting problems involving model biases of intensity and issues involving land interaction. The
long-standing HWRF problem with unrealistic, cold land surface temperatures was corrected with
the 2010 forecast system. Some further analysis and possible refinements to these land-related issues
will be discussed in addition to refinements in the new HWRF surface flux package.
A new surface flux package based on observations was implemented for the 2010 season that has in
part contributed to some improvements of track and intensity in HWRF. This new 2010 surface flux
package has been further examined and contrasted with packages used in other operational models.
Furthermore, this new package was generalized and recast in terms of momentum and thermal
roughness lengths. This new revised code has been installed in the new HWRF V3 model version to
be installed for 2011 operations. Some comparisons will be shown in running the HWRF model
using different flavors of the new formulation.
In order to quantify the impact of using a more sophisticated land model, i.e. the NOAH LSM,
HWRF underwent extensive testing in 2010. These tests including running the operational system,
H210, both for numerous historical cases of 2008-2009 and for nearly 300 cases in real-time for the
2010 Atlantic season. Besides using the NOAH LSM surface option, the tests also included changes
to the operational system to allow more frequent output of surface and sub-surface runnoff - a
requiremnt for a stream routing model. The standard verification parameters of mean track and
intenity errors were applied to these suite of cases. As opposed to prelimiary results using a previous
HWRF model version, the 20120 HWRF version with the NOAH LSM option led to some
degradation in both track and intensity at some forecast times. These results will be shown. Further
issues with the proposed 2011 HWRF version involving the transition from WRF 2 to WRF3 will
also be shown.
Session 5 – Page 2