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 environmental
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 for the
Observations Team 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. Last 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.