In many ways, the extended forecast of Hurricane Irma was an extraordinary triumph for weather prediction technology, with major global modeling systems (e.g., US GFS, European Center, Canadian, UKMET) suggesting a major threat to Florida a week or more out. Even a decade ago, we could not have done this well.
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Although the European Center solution was clearly superior, both U.S. and EC forecasts are very good....showing the threat to the U.S. more than a week ahead of time and predicting a sharp right turn days before. Other major modeling systems, such as the United Kingdom and Canadian models, did the same thing. Predicting the exact location of the right turn days ahead is simply beyond the science at this time and may always be, but the models were all excellent in predicting that such a turn would occur in the vicinity of Florida.

•The ability of the U.S. to forecast hurricanes has clearly improved. Congratulations.
•Five years after Hurricane Sandy, the U.S. has not caught up to the European Center, with both improving at roughly the same rate. We need to do better.
•The European Center does a better job at assimilating a wide variety of observations and their model has better physics (e.g., descriptions of moist processes) than the U.S. models--we need to up our game. The proposed new U.S. modeling system (FV-3) is not going to fix these areas.
•The U.S. has spent large amounts of money on hurricane models (e.g., HWRF and now HMON), but in many ways they are inferior to a coarser global model (EC), particularly for track forecasts.
•A clearly deficient hurricane model has recently been developed (for reasons that are not clear)...HMON. It is not ready for prime time, so why show it?
•There was a lot of confusion about which side of Florida would be hit by Irma. Much of this confusion can be traced to inadequate communication by the National Weather Service and the media, with substantial misunderstanding of ensemble prediction by the lay community. We need to do much better in this domain (more in a future blog).
•National Weather Service verification of model quality and hurricane forecast skill is very poor. Why do we have to depend on an innovative professor (Brian Tang), and unofficial web sites (e.g., weathernerds) to supply such information?