HFIP Products Overview

• Objective: The Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program (HFIP)  provides the basis for NOAA and other agencies to coordinate hurricane research needed to significantly improve guidance for hurricane track, intensity, and storm surge forecasts. It also engages and aligns the inter-agency and larger scientific community efforts towards addressing the challenges posed to improve hurricane forecasts. A consolidated webpage that displays experimental hurricane forecast guidance has been developed as part of the HFIP effort, see www.hfip.org/products.

• Goals: A consolidated website for the use of displaying HFIP experimental forecast guidance from various HFIP contributing organizations into one centralized location. The webpage showcases deterministic and ensemble model output, ATCF tracker data, probability products, and displays ensemble track data on Google maps. The model output is comprised of Stream 1, Stream 1.5, and Stream 2 forecast guidance requested by NHC that provides information to make informed decisions based on the best science available. Operational hurricane forecast models are known as Stream 1.0 models, (define Stream 1.5 and 2.0)

• Method: A team comprised of fourteen individuals representing HFIP funded groups worked together to develop a common method for displaying experimental forecast model output for evaluation and comparison. This involved creating common image generating scripts, developing a file naming convention, and creating a common location for all HFIP model image output where the images would be backed up to a mass storage device and downloaded to the HFIP web server.   The team’s willingness to work together sharing ideas has made the resulting product appear seamless.  NOAA's supercomputing system called 'Jet' is being used to run most of the forecast models.  Forecast model output is gathered on a disk partition where each organization has a named directory to stage a set of model output data for transfer to a specified web server, namely hfip.org hosted at NCAR. Members of this team have created GrADS image generating scripts and wrapper scripts to run on multiple model output formats, GRIB and NetCDF, containing a particular subset of forecast parameters specific to tropical cyclones as requested by NHC forecasting specialists. Images are presented in a common, user-friendly format that is easily accessible to our primary customer, NHC forecasters.

• Resources: Most of the experimental numerical weather prediction models are run on NOAA's Jet machine at Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) in Boulder, CO.  The experimental NRL COAMPS is run at NRL and the Operational models are run at NOAA/ EMC.

Participation

This website contain experimental analysis and forecast guidance from the following organizations:

Modeling Groups

• NOAA National Hurricane Center NHC 
• NOAA Environmental Modeling Center EMC Operations
• NOAA Global System Laboratory GSL FV3

Analysis Groups

• Tropical Cyclone Modeling Team (TCMT) RAL NCAR TCMT
• Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere CIRA

Participation prior years

Modeling Groups

• NOAA ESRL Physical Sciences Division PSD and the GFS EnKF
• NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory GFDL and the GFDL Hurricane Model Ensemble GPMN
• Navy Research Laboratory NRL COAMPS
• National Center for Atmospheric Research NCAR WRF ARW

Keyboard shortcuts for animating images

There are graphical buttons for controlling the animation of images. The controls are to the RIGHT of each animaiton.

These animation options can also be controlled by using your keyboard.

SPACEBAR = Start/stop animation

RIGHT arrow key → = Advance animation by 1 frame (+6 hrs)

LEFT arrow key ← = Reverse animation by 1 frame (-6 hrs)

DOWN arrow key ↓ = Slow animation speed *

UP arrow key ↑ = Increase animation speed *

<SHIFT>-F (while animating) = Animate forward

<SHIFT>-R (while animating) = Animate in reverse

<SHIFT>-B (while animating) = 'Bounce' animation

To skip an image, press the cooresponding frame number

Slow animation by changing the slider widget interactively, or with the UP and DOWN arrow keys

* (May not work on all browsers, namely FireFox on linux)