The Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP) supports NOAA’s hurricane forecast and warning capabilities through partnerships with the Environmental Modeling Center, National Hurricane Center, and the Hurricane Research Division.
The recently observed increase in the number of hurricanes and tropical storms in the North Atlantic (the most recent season with below normal activity was 2015) highlights an ever-increasing need for the most accurate forecast possible.
Computer resources are vital to numerical weather prediction used to predict the track and intensity of hurricanes. Running multiple-model runs, also known as ensembles, creates a greater demand on supercomputing resources. To supplement finite resources, the Hurricane Ensemble in Real-time on the Cloud (HERC), a Hurricane Analysis Forecast System (HAFS) based ensemble, took to the Cloud for the 2023 hurricane season.
This StoryMap shares the results of NOAA’s effort and highlights two specific named storms, Idalia and Philippe, for a comparison of performance and forecast confidence.
