Assimilation of Airborne Doppler Radar Data for Hurricane Initialization and Prediction in HWRF

Airborne Doppler radar data provide high resolution information of hurricane vortex structures. It has great potential to improve hurricane initialization and intensity forecast. The assimilation of airborne Doppler radar radial velocity data into the Hurricane Weather Research and Forecast System (HWRF) using the Grid-point Statistical Interpolation (GSI) analysis system has been developing and testing at NCEP/EMC. In this presentation, the assimilation and subsequent track and intensity forecast results will be compared with the operation HWRF run for several hurricane cases. The results of different assimilation strategies will be compared. The impact of assimilating additional data, such as pseudo minimum sea level pressure data and conventional data will also be discussed.