Progress on the High Impact Weather Prediction Project - A Mid-Project Update

In October 2012 Hurricane Sandy went on a costly and deadly rampage that began in the Caribbean, and ended after transitioning to a post-tropical cyclone, making landfall in New York. Along the path of its historically unprecedented track, Sandy caused 147 direct deaths, and in the US impacted 24 states and resulted in excess of $50B in damages. In 2013, as a part of the ‘Hurricane Sandy Disaster Relief Supplemental,' Congress included funding for NOAA to enhance and accelerate the development of our global weather modeling systems. Thus the High Impact Weather Prediction Project (HIWPP; pronounced “high-whip”) was born. We are now approximately two thirds of the way through the project, and we'd like to update the community on progress to date, and on how we are working to transition as much of this work as possible into operations in conjunction with the NOAA Next Generation Global Prediction System Program.

In brief: the $13M allocated for HIWPP over a three year period will be used to (i) improve the current generation of hydrostatic models, primarily by driving them to higher resolutions in space and time, and by statistical post processing; (ii) push the next generation, cloud resolving non-hydrostatic models towards a greater state of operational readiness, which includes scale aware physics, new hybrid data assimilation, and migrating to massively parallel fine grain computing; (iii) accelerate the development of moving hurricane nests, by embedding HWRF into the NMMB; (iv) improve our seasonal forecasts of high impact weather events in NMME; and finally, (v) tying all of these together with a common verification effort, and new state-of-the art data and visualization systems to rapidly access and analyze the data. We will achieve all of this by leveraging and enhancing ongoing efforts at 12 different organizations, both within and external to NOAA. An important aspect of HIWPP is to engage with the US weather enterprise, including the public, private and academic sectors.