At 00 UTC, a new implementation of NOAA’s global spectral model, then called the Aviation Model, produced a track forecast for Tropical Storm Andrew in the Atlantic. Earlier in the year, the model was upgraded so that it now had a resolution of about 210 km, and it had 18 levels in the vertical. Compare that to the current resolution of about 13 km and 64 levels in the vertical. Along with this upgrade, a new system to initialize tropical cyclones, known as a synthetic vortex, was implemented. This ensured that the storms were started in each model forecast at the correct location. The result was the first operational tropical cyclone forecast from a NOAA global model.
