NOAA’s Intensity Forecasting Experiment: Past, Present, and Future

The primary goal of NOAA/AOML’s Hurricane Research Division (HRD) is to improve the understanding and prediction of tropical cyclones (TCs). While this improvement can be accomplished from a variety of approaches, a unique capability of HRD is the routine collection and analysis of airborne observations within the inner-core and environmental atmospheric and oceanic environments. This data collection and analysis has formed the core of HRD’s mission for many decades. Over the past fifteen years this task has been accomplished under the Intensity Forecasting Experiment (IFEX). This talk will provide a summary of IFEX’s accomplishments, including a discussion of advances in NOAA’s airborne observing technologies and how these observations have been used to better characterize, understand, and predict physical processes important for TC intensity change. Finally, a look toward the future will be provided, including a discussion of new foci meant to broaden IFEX’s goals to include a more comprehensive improvement of forecasting of TC hazards.