An Overview of the Operational Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System: Current Implementation and Forward

The hurricane application team has developed the new generation Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System (HAFS) under the support of NOAA projects including hurricane supplementals, Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program (HFIP), Unified Forecast System (UFS) Research-to-Operations (R2O) project, and Joint Technology Transfer Initiative Program (JTTI). HAFS has five salient features: storm-following nest capability, vortex initialization and advanced Data Assimilation system, HYCOM ocean, parallel coupler, products generation package for research and forecasts. All features are relatively independent during the development stage. In this presentation, we will show configurations of the operational HAFS for the 2023 season and update the development progress after the initial operational implementation. We will give an overview of real-time results and identify science and forecast issues during the real-time operations and HFIP real-time demo experiments.