Wang Presents Milestones at HFIP Annual Meeting

Xuguang Wang, an associate professor and Presidential Research Professor, represented the data assimilation and ensemble development team of the NOAA Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program (HFIP) presented the milestones made by the team at the HFIP Annual Meeting held last week at the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami, FL . Prof. Wang has worked as the co-lead of the HFIP data assimilation team since 2012.

Wang’s co-lead role involves sharing the responsibility of lead the data assimilation team on strategic planning and on executing the plan to meet the HFIP goal of “reduce the average errors of hurricane track and intensity forecasts by 20% within five years and 50% in ten years with a forecast period out to 7 days”.

One the milestone she presented was this that the fully cycled self consistent hybrid ensemble-variational data assimilation system has been successfully implemented in the NWS operational convection, allowing hurricane prediction system HWRF. The system is planned to be operational in the 2017 hurricane season.