The primary goal of NOAA/AOML's Hurricane Research Division (HRD) is to improve the understanding and prediction of tropical cyclones (TCs). While this improvement can be accomplished from a variety of approaches, a unique capability of HRD is the routine collection and analysis of airborne observations within the inner-core and surrounding atmospheric and oceanic environments. This data collection and analysis has formed the core of HRD's mission for many decades. Over the past fifteen years this task has been accomplished under the Intensity Forecasting Experiment (IFEX). This talk will provide a summary of IFEX's accomplishments, including a discussion of advances in NOAA's airborne observing technologies and how these observations have been used to better characterize, understand, and predict physical processes important for TC intensity change. Finally, a look toward the future will be provided, including a discussion of new foci meant to broaden IFEX's goals to include a more comprehensive improvement of forecasting TC hazards.

About the Speaker:

Robert Rogers is Lead Meteorologist at NOAA's Hurricane Research Division in Miami, FL. His main areas of research involve studying the role of convective- and vortex-scale processes in tropical cyclone (TC) structure and intensity change, using a combination of aircraft observations and numerical models. He received his Bachelor's degree in Environmental Science from University of Virginia, and his M.S. and Ph.D in Meteorology from The Pennsylvania State University. He has received funding from NOAA, NASA, ONR, and NSF for his research. He has been interviewed for Science and The New York Times, and he has appeared on the Today Show to discuss his research. This year he received the Banner I. Miller Award, which is an AMS award for outstanding contribution to the science of hurricane and tropical weather forecasting in a publication with international circulation.
                   
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