A NOAA funded project in North Florida has been using the WRF model to produce model forecasts at the 5 kilometer (3 mile) scale using new high resolution datasets for over a year. The presentation will discuss the WRF project implementation and briefly report the results with examples, including a tropical cyclone case. With continued model development and local tuning, this project lends itself to even higher resolution wind, temperature and rainfall forecasting. Third party verification has shown the model produces more accurate forecasts than other operational models.

Much of Florida (and the Southeast US) weather occurs with forcing at scales smaller than 10 kilometers. The National Weather Service is much closer to this goal than is widely known. The newly developed Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model is capable of delivering such products at scales down to a single kilometer; a scale only available in radar data until now.