9710336 Krishnamurti Although there have been significant advances in the forecasting of hurricane track and intensity, especially in the one-to-two day range, longer range forecasts are much in need of improvement. The principal investigator and his colleagues will conduct an investigation into the possible improvements that might be realized through the use of ensemble forecasting for predictions up to five days in advance. They will focus on three primary areas of research: (1) further development and parallelization of a very high resolution regional model for use in forecasting, (2) testing of a new method to develop the perturbations used in ensemble forecasting, and (3) evaluation of the overall forecast skill of the FSU global model which employs a physical initialization (primarily initializing rain rates) compared with operational forecast models.