Intensity Forecasting EXperiment 2012
(IFEX12)

NOAA's Hurricane Research Division (HRD), part of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) 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 Hurricane Center (NHC), 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 also will be collected for NESDIS' Ocean Winds Experiment in a variety of tropical wind regimes as 'ground truth' for remote sensing equipment.

References:
Rogers, R., et al. "The Intensity Forecasting Experiment: A NOAA Multiyear Field Program for Improving Tropical Cyclone Intensity Forecasts", 2006, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, (v.87)n.11, p.1523-1537

Rogers, R., et al. "NOAA's Hurricane Intensity Forecasting Experiment: A Progress Report", 2013, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, (v.94)n.6, p.859-882