Streamlining Transition of New Developments to the Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting Model

The Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting model (HWRF) is a coupled atmosphere-ocean numerical weather prediction forecast system run operationally by the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) in all worldwide basins. In order to improve the HWRF numerical guidance, the model goes through a yearly development and testing cycle, which culminates with an operational upgrade before the start of the North Atlantic hurricane season.

HWRF is a complex system comprised of atmosphere and ocean forecast models, a set of initialization packages to downscale fields from the parent global model, perform cycled vortex initialization and data assimilation, plus a variety of postprocessing and product generation tools. Development for all these components, along with the object-oriented Python scripts that drive them, is conducted in a distributed manner. Innovations are contributed by the NOAA NCEP Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), by other NOAA research laboratories (such as the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory), and by scientists from universities and other academic institutions.

This poster describes the role of the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) in the HWRF developmental process. The DTC hosts the unified HWRF code repository, and supports HWRF developers in contributing and testing their innovations. This activity has been instrumental for focusing the investments of the NOAA Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP) and of the DTC Visitor Program, leading to new information about the strengths and weaknesses of HWRF through diagnostics, and to the transition of codes to higher levels of readiness (progress to next level of testing or to operational transition). Examples to be presented include the work done or fostered by DTC in the transition of the AOML HWRF multistorm capability, the development of alternate ways of initializing and outputting information from the Princeton Ocean Model for Tropical Cyclones by the University of Rhode Island, and the creation of tools for verifying HWRF synthetic satellite images by Coastal Carolina University.