WRF ARW For Hurricanes

What is Advanced Research Hurricane WRF (AHW)?

AHW is a sub-set of WRF-ARW that is defined by certain run-time options and used for hurricane research and real-time forecast. It uses the same dynamices, numerics and physics that may be used for studying other meteorological phenomena. AHW contains the following options:

• Two-way interactive moving nests with multiple nesting levels (since Version 2.1)
• Surface flux and drag formulations for high-wind conditions (since Version 3.0)
• One-dimensional ocean mixed layer model based on Pollard, Rhines and Thompson (1973) that is aimed at capturing the negative feedback of SST on hurricanes (i.e. the cooling of SST in the passage of a hurricane) (since Version 3.0)
• Any initialization techniques that are supported or derived from the community released code, including
• directly use of other model's data, including bogused initial conditions from GFDL,HWRF
• TC relocation and bogussing via utility program tc.exe
• TC bogussing via objective analysis (obsgrid)
• TC initialization via observation and analysis nudging
• TC initialization via 3DVar
• TC initialization via 4DVar
• TC initialization via EnKF (in combination with DART)

NCAR has been testing and running a few configurations of AHW since 2004.