Intensity Forecasting EXperiment 2009
(IFEX09)

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.

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.

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