Development of a Regional Hurricane OSSE System

Improving hurricane intensity forecasts is one of NOAA's most important goals. The keys for reaching this goal include improved observation systems, data assimilation and numerical modeling. An Observation System Simulation Experiment (OSSE) provides a tool to understand the process of assimilating observational data into hurricane models, and helps in the design of better observation systems with existing and future instruments, thereby improving the configuration of the entire forecast system. ESRL, AOML, UAS, and NASA are developing a regional hurricane OSSE system, designed specifically for hurricane intensity prediction. Sharing the effort with NCEP, NESDIS, and other agencies, we will identify a nature run with a realistic hurricane structure, provide guidance on UAS flight patterns and payloads combining with all existing observation systems sampled from the nature run, and improve our data assimilation and forecast systems. This presentation will report our progress on the nature run, synthetic observation generation, and the data assimilation and forecast models used in the OSSE.