Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System (HAFS) is a Unified Forecast System(UFS) based hurricane application developed in the UFS R2O project. It is an atmosphere-ocean-wave coupled Tropical Cyclone prediction system. It has five salient features: (1) storm-following telescopic moving nests, (2) high-resolution physics configured for TC application, (3) storm inner-core Data Assimilation (DA) with vortex initialization, (4) atmosphere-ocean-wave coupling framework, and (5) intensive hurricane observational platforms to support the storm-scale DA system as well as the physics calibrations and system verifications/validations. HAFS is scheduled to become operational on June 27, 2023 to replace NOAA’s existing operational TC forecast systems, HWRF and HMON.
In this talk, we will present detailed configuration of the first version of HAFS operational implementation and the scientific evaluation of the three-year (2020-2022) retrospective experiments. We will also outline the continuous development activities of HAFS in the Hurricane Integrated Application Team and the future plans for HAFS in the next year and beyond.
Dr. Zhan Zhang obtained his Ph.D degree in tropical meteorology from Florida State University. He has worked at various research and operational organizations. He is the Hurricane Modelling team lead at NCEP/EMC, and the co-lead of NOAA’s Unified Forecast System (UFS) research and operation (R2O) Hurricane Application Team. He specializes in Numerical Weather Prediction modeling, especially in tropical cyclone modeling. His research interests include hurricane ensemble forecasts, vortex initialization, hurricane inner-core data assimilation.
Dr. Xuejin Zhang is a Meteorologist employed in NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory’s Hurricane Research Division. He studies tropical cyclone forecast and simulation, land-air-sea interaction, regional climate, and parallel computing during his more than two-decade career. His expertise is in numerical algorithms, atmospheric dynamics, model initialization, and microphysics parameterization. He is currently leading the NOAA’s Unified Forecast System (UFS) R2O Hurricane Application Team. He obtained his Ph.D. in NC State University.
