Recent and Future Advances in Tropical Cyclone Modeling at NOAA's National Weather Service National Center for Environmental Prediction (NWS/NCEP)

Regional Hurricane modeling systems implemented at NWS/NCEP operations are now used for forecasting guidance in all ocean basins of the world. Lately, HWRF (Hurricane Weather Research and Forecast) modeling system has made significant improvements to the state of the art in numerical forecast guidance. These improvements come from advances in various components of the modeling system that are incorporated into the model in yearly cycles. In this talk we discuss model improvements in the 2015-2017 yearly upgrade cycles along with improvement plans for the next two to five years.

EMC hurricane team has also developed another non-hydrostatic hurricane model in NOAA Environmental Modeling System (NEMS) framework known as HMON (Hurricanes in a Multi-scale Ocean-coupled Non-hydrostatic) model which was implemented at NCEP operations this past year. Development of HMON is consistent with, and a step closer to developing NGGPS chosen FV3 dynamic core based global to local scale coupled models in a unified modeling framework. Operational configuration details of this new HMON model will be discussed, and its scientific performance compared to other models.