2.2    Hurricane WRF: 2012 Operational Implementation and        Community Support

Bernardet, Ligia, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/ESRL – Global Systems Division, Boulder, CO and  Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, V. Tallapragada, NOAA NCEP – Environmental Modeling Center, Silver Springs, MD, S. Bao, NOAA ESRL – Global Systems Division, Boulder, CO and Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, Y. Kwon, NOAA NCEP – Environmental Modeling Center, Silver Springs, MD and I. M. Systems Group, Inc. Rockville, MD,  S. Trahan, NOAA NCEP – Environmental Modeling Center, Silver Springs, MD,  Q. Liu, NOAA NCEP – Environmental Modeling Center, Silver Springs, MD, Z. Zhang (NOAA AOML Hurricane Research Division, Miami, FL and  RSMAS/CIMAS, University of Miami, S. Gopalakrishnan, NOAA AOML Hurricane Research Division, Miami, FL, R.  Yablonsky, University of  Rhode Island, B. Thomas, University of Rhode Island, T. Marchok, NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton, NJ

The HWRF model is an important component of the guidance used at the National Hurricane Center, making it critical that HWRF be continuously improved. For that reason, the NOAA/NCEP Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) has partnered with the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) to accelerate the transfer of new developments onto HWRF.

The atmospheric component of HWRF is a configuration of the WRF model which has recently been advanced to include a revised nest motion algorithm and an observations-based boundary layer parameterization scheme that were developed by  NCEP/EMC and NOAA/AOML Hurricane Research Division. HWRF's oceanic component is a version of the Princeton Ocean Model adapted for tropical cyclones, which was developed at the University of Rhode Island. Additionally, HWRF uses vortex cycling for atmospheric initialization, a feature-based ocean initialization, and a tracker to extract information from the output.

In this presentation, we will give an overview of community HWRF v3.3a released in 2011, and discuss the 2012 operational configuration and the new capabilities users can expect in the upcoming HWRF v3.4a release.