College of Aviation Research Projects

Producing reliable tropical cyclone (TC) genesis forecasts is an operational priority. The National Hurricane Center uses several TC genesis guidance products for their Tropical Weather Outlook. Furthermore, global model output is used in many TC genesis guidance products and is considered an important source of deterministic TC genesis forecast guidance. This project creates a standard framework for verifying deterministic and probabilistic TC genesis forecasts using the TC-Gen tool in the Model Evaluation Tools software package.

Accurately predicting tropical cyclone (TC) genesis is an important component of providing the public with the information they need to protect life and property in the event of a landfalling storm.  The National Hurricane Center (NHC) issues probabilistic forecasts of TC genesis within two and five days in their Tropical Weather Outlook product.  There are several guidance products available to the forecasters, many of which rely at least in part on global forecast models.  It is important to understand how accurate these guidance products and the global models are at forecasting TC genesis.

This project seeks to create a standard framework for verifying TC genesis forecasts from various sources.  This will allow a straightforward comparison between official forecasts, the experimental guidance products, and global model forecasts.  These verification capabilities are developed within the existing Model Evaluation Tools (MET) software package from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).  As such, the user will have considerable flexibility when setting up a verification task.  They will also be provided numerous output statistics for deterministic and probabilistic forecasts.