NWP with the Weather Research and Forecast model and local data assimilation as a prelude to “Neighborhood Weather”

The NOAA Coastal Storms Initiative (CSI) pilot program was located in the St. Johns River basin in Northeast Florida, and had an overarching goal of lessening the impact of storms on coastal communities. One of the nine projects approved as part of the CSI was the implementation of a locally-run mesoscale numerical weather prediction (NWP) model with additional local data assimilation at the Weather Forecast Office (WFO) in Jacksonville (JAX), Florida. A small team of collaborators has put together a high-resolution atmospheric modeling system as an operational adjunct in the WFO.

This successful project was the first real-time use of the WRF model with local data assimilation in the nation. The model ran at 5 km resolution and with explicit convection. This level of resolution in numerical weather prediction is able to forecast individual thunderstorms and is only one step removed from modeling neighborhood weather. Results of model comparisons for winds, temperatures, sea breeze detection and convective rain will be presented for the summer of 2003, with some additional results of the 2004 Florida hurricane forecasts by this limited domain model.