Session Chairs: Sundararaman Gopalakrishnan (NOAA/AOML) and Aaron Poyer (NOAA/NWS)
NOAA’s Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program (HFIP) was created in 2009 with the vision of organizing the hurricane community to dramatically improve numerical forecast guidance to the National Hurricane Center. Since HFIP’s inception in 2009, model hurricane track and intensity forecast errors were reduced by 50% and 56%, respectively, and intensity errors during Rapidly Intensifying storms were reduced by 47%. The Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF) became world-class (2014).
In 2017, Congress passed the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act including Section 104, Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program, instructing NOAA to maintain a project to improve hurricane forecasting to develop and extend accurate hurricane forecasts and warnings to reduce loss of life, injury, and damage to the economy, with a focus on improving the prediction of rapid intensification and track of hurricanes; improving the forecast and communication of surges from hurricanes; and incorporating risk communication research to create more effective watch and warning products. Under the updated plan, HFIP will continue to address the original goals of reducing track and intensity forecast errors by 20% within 5 years and 50% within 10 years and extend forecasts out to 7 days, particularly focusing on rapid intensification guidance. In addition, the updated plan extends HFIP’s purview to improving guidance on predicting storm structure and all hurricane hazards (surge, rain, associated severe weather, gusts as well as sustained winds) at actionable lead times for emergency managers (e.g., 72 hours). Improved hazard guidance will derive from dynamical model ensembles enabling probabilistic hazard products and improved track, intensity change, and structure (radii to maximum and 35-knot winds) predictions before formation and throughout the storm’s life cycle. Using social science research, HFIP will design a more effective tropical cyclone product suite to communicate risk better and transition all current tropical hazards products. The Hurricane Analysis and Forecasting System (HAFS) was created to address these goals.
As in the past AMS hurricane meetings, we expect 4-5 HFIP sessions (with 30-50 presentations/posters) dealing with numerical modeling and inner-core DA techniques, basic research of modeled TCs, understanding RI of TCs, research related to Ensembles, and probabilistic products, especially using NOAA models: HWRF, HAFS, GFS, GEFS, etc.
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