Community Hurricane Weather Research and Forecast (HWRF) work at the Developmental Testbed Center

HWRF is a specialized version of the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model that has been designed to simulate and predict tropical cyclones. It was developed at EMC/NCEP based upon WRF version 2.0 and became operational in the 2007 hurricane season. During its development, numerous features were implemented to improve performance. However most of these advances are not available to the research community. Meanwhile, the general WRF model has evolved from version 2.0 to version 3.2 with contributions from the research community, but these contributions do not have a clear path to benefit the operational forecast.

The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is a joint effort between the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the Global Systems Division (GSD) at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. The dual mission of the DTC is to accelerate the infusion of promising new numerical weather prediction (NWP) and data assimilation capabilities developed by the research community into operational applications, while also making an entire end-to-end operational NWP model code available and supportable to the research community.

Over the past two years, as a part of the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP) effort, the DTC has taken on the challenge of providing the operational Hurricane HWRF running at the NOAA NCEP to the community. DTC has upgraded and ported the operational HWRF system to DTC computers and provides support to the community in using the operational HWRF. A hurricane testing and evaluation infrastructure at DTC was developed using NOAA workflow manager. HWRF tests will be performed to assure integrity of code and evaluate new developments for potential operational implementation. This presentation will summarize these DTC efforts toward facilitating the research to operation (R2O) to improve the HWRF forecasting performance.