Application of COAMPS-TC for HFIP

The newly developed Coupled Ocean/Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System – Tropical Cyclone (COAMPS®-TC) designed to predict tropical cyclone track, structure and intensity has been applied in real time in support of the recent Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP) in the Atlantic and Eastern, Central and Western Pacific for the 2009 and 2010 seasons. For these real time tests, COAMPS-TC system was configured with three nested grids with 45, 15, 5 km horizontal resolution, with the inner two most meshes moving with the tropical cyclone center. Statistical verification indicates that the COAMPS-TC system provided skillful track forecasts competitive with other limited area and global models. Systematic biases have been identified in the track and intensity forecasts based on the previous HFIP real time forecasts. A new version of COAMPS-TC recently has been evaluated using the HFIP retrospective cases performed for 2008 and 2009. This new COAMPS-TC version includes a number of improvements to several model components including the initialization and model parameterizations. The new version of COAMPS-TC shows improvements in the intensity forecasts for both the W. Pacific and Atlantic basins, on par with other statistical and dynamical models for forecast lead times out to 48 h. An update on recent sensitivity tests of the TC track and intensity forecasts to aspects of the model physics and lateral boundary conditions will be presented as well.