Intensity Forecasting EXperiment 2008
(IFEX08)
NOAA's Hurricane Research Division, part of the Atlantic Oceanographic and
Meteorological Laboratories located in Miami, FL, is in the midst of a
multi-year experiment along with the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center (AOC)
called the Intensity Forecasting Experiment (IFEX). Developed in partnership
with NOAA's Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) and its Tropical Prediction
Center, IFEX is intended to improve our understanding and prediction of
hurricane intensity change by collecting observations that will aid in the
improvement of current operational models and the development of the
next-generation operational hurricane model, the Hurricane Weather Research
and Forecasting model (HWRF). Observations will be collected in a variety of
hurricanes at different stages in their lifecycle, from formation and early
organization to peak intensity and subsequent landfall or decay over open
water.
There are several unique aspects of IFEX in 2008 that will help improve our
understanding and prediction of hurricane intensity change:
-
Three-Dimensional Doppler Winds experiment
- Tropical Cyclone Landfall
and Inland Decay Experiment
- Tropical Cyclone Unmanned Aerial
System (UAS) Inflow/Eyewall/Eye Experiment
-
Tropical Cyclogenesis Experiment (GenEx)
- Nadir Off-set SFMR Experiment
- Tropical Cyclone/AEW Arc Cloud Experiment
-
Saharan Air Layer Experiment (SALEX)
- Sea-Salt Aerosol and Cloud Base Number Concentration Experiment
- Eyewall Microphysics Experiment
- TC-Ocean Interaction Experiment
-
Hurricane Synoptic Surveillance
During this year, IFEX will be operating in partnership with several other
experiments:
-
NOAA Ocean Winds Experiment - The goal of the Ocean Winds experiment
is to further our understanding of wind direction and speed retrievals
at the ocean surface level from microwave remote-sensing measurements in
high wind conditions and in the presence of rain. Measurements taken from
the Ocean Winds experiment in mature storms will aid in the understanding
and improvement of satellite remotely-sensed wind measurements which
are currently used operationally by marine forecates and in numerical
weather prediction models.