NOAA's Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP): Project Plan and Status Report

Responding to the growing need to improve hurricane-forecasting capability, NOAA formed the Hurricane Forecasting Improvement Project (HFIP) in 2007, a 10-year project designed to (1) provide the basis for NOAA and other agencies to work towards an effort to coordinate national hurricane research needed to significantly improve guidance for hurricane track, intensity, and storm surge forecasts, and (2) engage the inter-agency and larger scientific community efforts towards addressing the challenges posed to improve hurricane forecasts. The goals of the HFIP are to improve the accuracy and reliability of hurricane forecasts; to extend lead-time for hurricane forecasts with increased certainty; and to increase forecaster confidence in hurricane forecast guidance. NOAA's strategy under HFIP is to develop higher resolution global and regional models that can make full use of the higher resolution data already being collected and use ensembles of these models to assess uncertainty in the forecast guidance. This will be achieved by reducing the average errors of hurricane track and intensity forecasts at all lead times by 20% within 5 years and by 50% in 10 years, improving the skill in forecasting rapid intensity changes (both increases and decreases), and by improved storm surge forecasting. The benefits of HFIP will significantly improve NOAA's forecast services through improved hurricane forecast science and technology. It establishes a unified approach to hurricane improvements across NOAA operating units and calls for collaboration with our federal partners and the external research community in its execution. In the first two years of the project NOAA engaged the external research community to test the benefits of high-resolution model simulations toward improving forecast guidance through two main thrusts: (1) the High-Resolution Hurricane (HRH) test; and (2) the HFIP-Texas Advance Computing Center (TACC) real-time demonstration. An overview and status update from the first two years of HFIP will be presented.