Recent Improvements to the Navy's COAMPS-TC Tropical Cyclone Forecast System and Transition to Operations

The Coupled Ocean/Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System for Tropical Cyclones (COAMPS-TC) has been developed specifically for forecasting tropical cyclone track, structure, and intensity over the past five years. In this presentation, we will provide an overview on the development and performance of COAMPS-TC, as well as the transition of the system to Navy operations at the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center in 2013, with the latest version transitioned in 2015. The COAMPS-TC has been tested in real time in both coupled and uncoupled modes over the past five tropical cyclone seasons in the Pacific and Atlantic basins at a horizontal resolution of 5 km. The real-time testing has been motivated by several recent multi-agency programs and efforts: i) the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP), which is focused on the W. Atlantic and E. Pacific basins, ii) the recent NASA HS3 and ONR TCI programs, iii) testing of new versions of COAMPS-TC in W. Atlantic and W. Pacific basin, and iv) an Navy-NOAA ensemble COAMPS-TC system that was demonstrated in real time in 2014-15 and combined with the HWRF and GFDL model ensembles to comprise a national multi-model ensemble. An evaluation of a large sample of real time forecasts for 2014-2015 in many different basin across the world reveals that the COAMPS-TC intensity predictions have intensity errors on par with the established real-time dynamical forecast models. Additionally, evaluation of real-time COAMPS-TC forecasts will be presented with a focus on challenges and successes related to tropical cyclone intensity prediction. Recent results for the high-resolution (3 km) COAMPS-TC ensemble that was run over the W. Atlantic basins will be discussed as well. The results of this research highlight the promise of high-resolution deterministic and ensemble-based approaches for tropical cyclone prediction using COAMPS-TC. We will discuss lessons learned regarding the transition of forecast systems such as COAMPS-TC to operations, as well.