A new shallow-water model for tropical cyclone track prediction has been developed at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Munich. The model is formulated on a discrete grid in geocentric spherical coordinates. A tropical cyclone is represented with high resolution using interactively-nested vortex-relative meshes. The initialisation of the model is carried out using a new vortex enhancement scheme which makes use of data included in tropical cyclone advisories. The enhancement scheme is based on the results of recent theoretical studies.
The model has been tested extensively for all Atlantic hurricane that occurred in 1996, using deep-layer-mean data of NCEP (National Center for Enviromental Prediction, USA). The track forecasts with the new model lead to an improvement of the accuracy in comparison with VICBAR in cases of recurving and erratically moving storms. The potential of the new model for ensemble forecasting is investigated. The results of the tests with the new model will be presented at the