Hurricane Forecast and Analysis

Our hurricane and tropical cyclone research and operational services leverage the strongest technical skills in academia, federal laboraties and operations. Scientists at Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) collaborate with the world's leading authorities on hurricanes.

Our scientific research and operational services are conducted for government agencies and commercial clients and focus in several areas including:

1. Develop an array of tropical cyclone probabilistic forecasts
2. Improve early warning timeframes — to reduce and respond to hurricane risk
3. Support decision-making and best practices in business and government

Hurricane and Tropical Meteorology

Our experts in hurricanes and tropical meteorology have extensive experience in developing and applying numerical modeling and data assimilation codes to simulations and forecasting of hurricanes. Some recent examples include mesoscale hurricane simulations, and the use of scatterometer data in the ECMWF’s forecasts of tropical cyclones.

We bring deep knowledge through developing and applying mesoscale modeling and data assimilation codes, for applications ranging from operational real-time weather forecasting, air quality modeling and weather modification research. AER is currently collaborating with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) on the development of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) components of a four-dimensional variational analysis (4dvar) data assimilation system. As part of a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, AER has implemented our improved shortwave and longwave RRTMG radiation package in the WRF model.

In addition, AER maintains an extensive, searchable climate reanalysis database that includes the capability to run retrospective WRF simulations to downscale the large-scale reanalysis datasets.

AER pioneered some of the concepts underlying ensemble forecasting techniques over 25 years ago, and has continued research in ensemble techniques for probabilistic forecasts.