Improving Hurricane Forecasts by Improving Ocean Models
Hurricanes, typhoons & tropical cyclones are among the most destructive natural events on Earth. Continued advances in hurricane science, leading to increased forecast accuracy and lead times, is required to promote more timely and effective hurricane responses that save lives, property and livelihoods.
In the last two decades the National Weather Service has recognized the need to improve their hurricane intensity forecasts in order to better guide the response of coastal communities during storms. Hurricane forecasting models require accurate ocean and atmosphere initial conditions to better forecast hurricane intensity. These initial conditions are created be assimilating many diverse datasets including those from numerous satellites, Argo profilers, CTD deployments from ships and remote platforms, ocean drifters, and ocean gliders. These ocean datasets not only give modelers an accurate initial condition for their models, but also allow them to later evaluate the accuracy of the models, enabling them to improve the model accuracy.
The work here focuses on comparing multiple model forecasts/nowcasts to in situ datasets that will enable modelers to evaluate their model’s accuracy. The models are compares to ocean gliders (above) and to surface drifters and Argo profilers.
Model/Data Comparisons
This is a map of the Caribbean basin showing the gliders and Argo floats (colored dots) reporting data during the arrival of Hurricane Melissa in 2025 (light blue track). The image colors represent heat content after the storm’s passage. Note the cold water patch just south of Jamaica. The heat taken from the ocean at that location helped fuel Melissa’s intensity and severe destruction of the southern Jamaica coast.
This is a plot of temperature, salinity and density profiles for glider RU29 just off the coast of Barbados. We provide corresponding temperature and salinity profiles for all gliders reporting to the IOOS glider DAC. We compare these glider profiles to the nearest model grid vertical profiles for three global operational ocean models: Real Time Ocean Forecasting System (RTOFS), Navy Earth System Prediction Capability (ESPC) and the Copernicus marine Service (CMEMS)