Impact of Assimilating Aircraft Reconnaissance Observations in Operational HWRF on Improving Hurricane Forecast for the 2017 Atlantic High-Impact Storms

Operational forecasts from the NCEP Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF) model had their best year on record during the extremely active 2017 hurricane season. A number of data denial studies have been conducted to investigate the effect of aircraft reconnaissance observations on HWRF. Four high-impact hurricanes (Harvey, Irma, Jose, and Maria, 2017) were chosen as case studies for this data denial experiment, and initial results suggest reconnaissance significantly improves HWRF performance. The impact of individual reconnaissance types, including tail Doppler radar, high-density flight-level observations, and dropsondes, will be discussed.