An international workshop was convened to improve tropical cyclone predictions for the North Indian Ocean. It was co-sponsored by the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Ministry of Earth Sciences (of India), NOAA, and the National Science Foundation. It was hosted by the Indian Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar and featured tropical cyclone experts from India, Australia, and the United States. Dr. Frank Marks, Director of AOML’s Hurricane Research Division (HRD), led the U.S. delegation, while Dr. Sundararaman Gopalakrishnan of HRD served as one of the workshop’s three principal organizers. The workshop featured 11 eminent scientists from the United States, five from India, and one from Australia. Training sessions consisted of 36 h of lectures and 10 h of colloquiums, plus discussion sessions and opportunities for participant-lecturer interactions. More than 27 young scientists from academic and meteorological research organizations across India attended, as well as four young scientists from U.S. universities.
Central to the workshop was NOAA’s high-resolution, state-of-the-art HWRF modeling system. HWRF became operational in 2007 and has since improved tropical cyclone track, intensity, and structure forecasts. India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences and NOAA signed an Implementing Arrangement under the Memorandum of Understanding in 2010 for the India Meteorological Department (IMD) and HRD to improve tropical cyclone forecasts over the Indian seas. As part of this agreement, NOAA transferred the HWRF modeling system to the India Meteorological Department and its partnering research institution, the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. The workshop enabled a sharing of data assimilation and forecasting techniques acquired over the past few years by NOAA and its partnering institutions in the United States.
A zip archive of the 35 lectures is available on the anonymous ftp archive here (1 Gb)
