Determining the error characteristics of H*Wind

The HRD Real-time Hurricane Wind Analysis System (H*Wind) is an analytical tool used by NOAA's Hurricane Research Division to assimilate wind observations from a tropical cyclone and output a snapshot of the storm's wind field. This product is used to assess both the intensity and the spatial extent of tropical cyclone winds. In this investigation, the accuracy of the H*Wind product is analyzed by addressing the contributions of several sources of error. With a knowledge of the error sources associated with H*Wind and their contributions, researchers and forecasters will have a better understanding of the uncertainty, resulting in better usage of the H*Wind product. Some of the potential sources of error include smoothing and interpolation errors in the H*Wind software, temporal drift resulting from combining non-simultaneous measurements, relative bias between different data platforms, and random observation errors. This analysis will determine the sum of the contributions of these errors, as well as the individual error contributions of smoothing and interpolation.