Hurricane forecasts during the 2009 season using a suite of mesoscale models

A first time national initiative was made to disseminate realtime hurricane forecasts during the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season using a suite of mesoscale models. The member models used for the ensemble included the operational HWRF, an experimental HWRF (inner domain 4km), HWRF-x (HRD), COAMPS (NRL), operational GFDL, ARW (NCAR) and ARW (FSU). Five day forecasts were run for two cycles (0000 and 1200 UTC) when a tropical system was present. The ensemble mean of the member models was made both for track and intensity forecasts and compared to the individual member models. Some models had problem dealing with the sheared environment and showed signs of over intensification. The performance of the mesoscale suite along with the ensemble mean is presented. The problem of initialization of the FSU-ARW model is also shown. Some future work is presented on how to improve the ensemble prediction of track and intensity.