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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Earth Sci.
Sec. Atmospheric Science
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/feart.2024.1419233
This article is part of the Research Topic Tropical Cyclone Modeling and Prediction: Advances in Model Development and Its Applications View all 10 articles

Implementation of Storm-Following Nest for the Next Generation Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System (HAFS)

Provisionally accepted
William Ramstrom William Ramstrom 1,2*Xuejin Zhang Xuejin Zhang 2Kyle Ahern Kyle Ahern 2,3Sundararaman Gopalakrishnan Sundararaman Gopalakrishnan 2
  • 1 The Cooperative Institute For Marine And Atmospheric Studies,University of Miami, Miami, United States
  • 2 Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (NOAA), Miami, Florida, United States
  • 3 Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami, Miami, Florida, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The Hurricane Analysis and Forecast system (HAFS) is the next generation numerical model embedded within NOAA's Unified forecasting system (UFS). The document highlights the importance of high horizontal resolution (2 km or finer) in accurately simulating the small-scale features of tropical cyclones, such as the eyewall and eye. To meet this need, NOAA has developed the Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System (HAFS), which includes a high-resolution, stormfollowing nest. This nest moves with the cyclone, allowing better representation of small-scale features and more accurate feedback between the cyclone's inner core and the larger environment. This hurricane-following nest capability, implemented within the UFS and using the Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere (FV3) dynamical core, can be run both within the regional as well as global forecast systems. While the regional version of HAFS with a single moving nest went into operations in 2023, this is the first ever moving nest implemented within a global model and will be advanced for future research. In this document we provide details of the implementation of moving nests and provide some of the results from both global and regional simulations. For the first time NOAA P3 flight data was used to evaluate the inner core structure from the global run.

    Keywords: Hurricane, tropical cyclone, Numerical Weather Prediction, Hafs, FV3 Moving Nest Implementation

    Received: 17 Apr 2024; Accepted: 26 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Ramstrom, Zhang, Ahern and Gopalakrishnan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: William Ramstrom, The Cooperative Institute For Marine And Atmospheric Studies,University of Miami, Miami, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.