P84  Hurricane WRF (HWRF) Community Support and Benchmark

Bao, Shaowu, L. Bernardet, T. Brown, National Oceanic and Atmopsheric Association/ESRL, D. Stark,  L. Carson, NCAR

The Hurricane Weather Research and Forecast (HWRF) system for hurricane prediction was adopted by the National Weather Service (NWS)/ National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)Ős Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) to address the NationŐs next generation hurricane forecast problems.

The HWRF system is composed of the WRF model software infrastructure, a modified version of the Non-Hydrostatic Mesoscale Model (NMM) dynamic core, the Princeton Ocean Model for Tropical cyclones (POM-TC), the NCEP/EMC coupler, a physics suite tailored to the tropics, vortex initialization and pre- and post-processing capabilities.

The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) serves as the bridge to fill the gap between the operational and research communities to facilitate the transfer of new research and development into operation.  DTC has partnered with EMC to provide community support of the HWRF system through code releases, a users website, online and resident tutorials, documentation and a help-desk service. In this presentation, the HWRF system and its community support will be described and benchmark results (Reference Configuration) of the community HWRF track and intensity forecasts will be presented.