Evaluation of Real-time Hurricane Forecasts Using the Advanced Hurricane WRF Model for the 2007 Atlantic Hurricane Season.

Real-time forecasts have been conducted with the Advanced Hurricane WRF Model (AHW) for named storms of the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season. Taking advantage of increased computational power over previous years, 5- day forecasts are conducted daily using three domains; two nests of 4km and 1.3km grid-spacing track the vortex within a fixed parent domain of 12km grid-spacing. In this presentation, forecast accuracy in terms of track and intensity will be presented. The quality of the forecast storm intensity can vary dramatically between storms, and sometimes between successive forecasts of a given storm. This variability in model performance is explored by analyzing the statistics of the observed and model storm intensities for the 2007 hurricane season. Conditions under which the model performs poorly are identified and a series of sensitivity simulations highlight aspects of the modeling system to which the forecast intensity is most sensitive.