NHC’s use of oceanic observations for hurricane and marine prediction and assessments

One of the challenges of operational forecasting in the tropical Atlantic Ocean is the lack of marine observations, especially compared to places like the North Atlantic where there is much more ship traffic. In addition, there is little significant wave height information on most platforms, and this tends to be the least reported data. Since most Atlantic tropical cyclones originally pass through the tropical Atlantic as waves or weak disturbances, the PIRATA buoy array fills in an important gap in the surface data network and can be the first direct surface measurements of a disturbance or tropical cyclone. There are still some significant gaps that prevent the buoy network from taking on a larger role in operations, including the temporal frequency of data, scarcity of platforms, and a lack of the full suite of atmospheric and oceanic sensors on the buoys. The talk will show some examples where the oceanic and atmospheric data are useful both in real-time and in post-analysis, highlight what types of observations are more useful and needed, and discuss NHC future priorities for tropical cyclone and marine analysis and modeling.