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

Objective evaluation of 2010 HFIP Stream 1.5 candidates
Louisa Nance, Christopher L. Williams, Michelle Harrold, Kathryn Newman, Paul Kucera, and
Barbara Brown
(nance@ucar.edu)
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO
The Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP) provides the basis for NOAA and other
agencies to coordinate hurricane research needed to significantly improve numerical guidance
for hurricane forecasts. HFIP activities supporting the yearly upgrades made to operational
numerical weather prediction (NWP) capabilities are referred to as “Stream 1”; whereas efforts
taking multiple years to enhance operations are referred to as “Stream 2”. In 2010, HFIP and the
National Hurricane Center (NHC) established a new, intermediate pathway to operations known
as “Stream 1.5”. Stream 1.5 covers experimental models and/or techniques that NHC, based on
prior assessments, wants to access in real-time during a particular hurricane season, but which
cannot be made available to NHC by the operational modeling centers in conventional
“production” mode. Stream 1.5 projects are run as part of HFIP’s annual “Demonstration
Project”. To qualify, participation by a candidate project must be approved by HFIP
management and the NHC. Part of the basis for this approval is demonstrated performance
through extensive retrospective testing. The retrospective testing for the 2010 Stream 1.5
candidates focused on a representative sample of 27 storms from the 2008 and 2009 hurricane
seasons. Four modeling groups participated in this retrospective test activity: Geophysical Fluid
Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) – GFDL hurricane model, Mesoscale and Microscale
Meteorology (MMM) division of the NCAR Earth System Laboratory (NESL) – Advanced
Hurricane WRF (AHW), Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) – Couple Ocean/Atmosphere
Mesoscale Prediction System - Tropical Cyclone (COAMPS-TC), and Florida State University
(FSU) – Advanced Research WRF (ARW). This presentation will discuss the objective
evaluation of the submitted retrospective forecasts that was conducted by the Tropical Cyclone
Modeling Team (TCMT) located in the Joint Numerical Testbed (JNT) of NCAR’s Research
Applications Laboratory (RAL). The presentation will briefly review the methodology used for
this evaluation, summarize the high lights of the evaluation and discuss plans for the 2011
Stream 1.5 retrospective testing.
Session 7 – Page 2