Status on reaching the Goals of the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP)

The Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program (HFIP) has goals to reduce the error in track and intensity forecast guidance from numerical model systems by 20% in five years (by 2014) and 50% in 10 years. Additional goals include skillful 7 day forecasts and a greatly increased ability to forecast rapid intensification and decay. To meet these goals by the deadlines the HFIP has organized a large component of the hurricane community to focus on various aspects of development of the numerical and statistical model forecast guidance systems expected to lead to these improvements. This includes development of advanced data assimilation systems and ensemble systems at high resolution for both regional and global models followed by statistical post processing.

The transition to operations process for HFIP was discussed in this conference last year and is summarized extensively in a recent Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society article: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-12-00071.1. In this presentation we will focus on results from the project.

We are nearing the end of the first 4 years of the HFIP and if the Project is to be successful after its first 5 years, some of the research results that it has been working on with NCEP and the community to get into operations ought to be apparent in operational hurricane model results. In this talk we will outline those results and note where we need to focus the effort during the next 5 years.