JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – When it comes to predicting the strength of hurricanes the HWRF model, won this hurricane season.
Scientists at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction have been working on ways to improve intensity prediction which skill lags behind compared to track prediction.
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Pinpointing why and when a hurricane rapidly intensify has been the trickiest challenge for forecasters.
Hurricane Harvey went from a hurricane to a Category 4 in just 57 hours in a process, known as "rapid intensification."
This season "RI" happened four times with hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Jose, and Maria.
A storm undergoes rapid intensification when its maximum sustained winds increase at least 35 mph in 24 hours or less.
It is notoriously hard to predict rapid intensification because models don't get all the variables that feed into it and quite often rapid intensification doesn't always happen when all the conditions are there.
But investment in the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP), is helping and put the HWRF at the top of hurricane intensifies forecasting models for the 2017 Atlantic season according to the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Miami.
It's success is due to Tail Doppler radar analyses that gets fed into the model. It pinpoints where the strongest winds are located, how far they extend outward from the storm’s center, and the regions of heaviest rainfall. They also enable researchers to observe changes in strength.
This was the first year tail Doppler radar was assimilated into an experimental, more advanced version of the 2017 HWRF model called the basin-scale HWRF, or HWRF-B. It ran next to the HWRF during Hurricanes Harvey and Irma and showed up to a 10% improvement in the track forecasts over the operational HWRF model.
Also for the first time since 2014, Coyote's flew in hurricane Maria.
What's a Coyote? A drone deployed from a hurricane hunter that gathers data in the lowest most critically important reaches of the hurricane environment.
A Coyote flew as low as 300 feet in Maria to collect moisture and heat exchange data in place too dangerously low for hurricane hunters.
Intensity forecasts still have a long way to catch up to the current success in nailing down storm paths. Until them predicting where storms head is a battle between the GFS and the ECMWF, the latter which most often wins.