Advancing the State of the Art in Tropical Cyclone Modeling at NOAA's National Weather Service National Center for Environmental Prediction (NWS/NCEP)

Regional Hurricane modeling systems developed and implemented into operations at

National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) of National Oceanic and

Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Weather Service (NWS) are now used

for tropical cyclone forecast guidance in all ocean basins of the world. Lately, HWRF

(Hurricane Weather Research and Forecast) modeling system has made significant

improvements to the state of the art in numerical guidance for tropical cyclone track,

intensity, size, structure and rainfall forecasts. These improvements come from

advances in various components of the modeling system that are incorporated into the

model in yearly upgrade cycles.

NWS/NCEP/Environmental Modeling Center’s hurricane team has also developed

another non-hydrostatic hurricane model in NOAA Environmental Modeling System

(NEMS) framework known as HMON (Hurricanes in a Multi-scale Ocean-coupled

Non-hydrostatic) model which was implemented at NCEP operations this past year.

Development of HMON is consistent with, and a step closer to developing NGGPS

chosen FV3 dynamic core based global to local scale coupled models in a unified

modeling framework. In this presentation, operational configuration details of this new

HMON model are discussed along with operational HWRF model upgrades, and their

forecast performance is compared to other models. Plans for hurricane model

improvements in the next two to five years will also be discussed and presented.