Objective evaluation of 2011 HFIP Stream 1.5 candidates

The Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP) provides the basis for NOAA and other agencies to coordinate hurricane research needed to significantly improve numerical guidance for hurricane forecasts. HFIP activities supporting the yearly upgrades made to operational numerical weather prediction (NWP) capabilities are referred to as “Stream 1”; whereas efforts taking multiple years to enhance operations are referred to as “Stream 2”. In 2010, HFIP and the National Hurricane Center (NHC) established a new, intermediate pathway to operations known as “Stream 1.5”. Stream 1.5 covers experimental models and/or techniques that NHC, based on prior assessments, wants to access in real-time during a particular hurricane season, but which cannot be made available to NHC by the operational modeling centers in conventional “production” mode. Stream 1.5 projects are run as part of HFIP's annual “Demonstration Project”. To qualify, participation by a candidate project must be approved by HFIP management and the NHC. Part of the basis for this approval is demonstrated performance through extensive retrospective testing. The retrospective testing for the 2011 Stream 1.5 candidates focused on a representative sample of 27 Atlantic Basin and 13 Eastern North Pacific storms from the 2008, 2009 and 2010 hurricane seasons. Eight modeling groups participated in this retrospective test activity. The models included an experimental global model, three configurations of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and two other regional tropical cyclone models, a regional ensemble system, and an experimental statistical-dynamical model. This presentation will discuss the objective evaluation of the submitted retrospective forecasts that was conducted by the Tropical Cyclone Modeling Team (TCMT) located in the Joint Numerical Testbed (JNT) of NCAR's Research Applications Laboratory (RAL). The presentation will briefly review the methodology used for this evaluation and summarize the high lights of the evaluation.