This award provides support for graduate students and early-career scientists to attend a workshop on data assimilation and numerical modeling for tropical cyclone (TC) predictions, held at the Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneshwar in Odisha, India, 9-14 July 2012. The workshop is organized through the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum and is part of an ongoing collaboration between the US and Indian operational research communities, formed through a Memorandum of Understanding between the Indian Ministry of Earth Sciences and the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. The workshop has a lecture format, intended to educate a joint US-Indian workforce of researchers and operational TC forecasters, with an agenda that begins with fundamental observations and theory and proceeds through advanced modeling concepts, principles and applications of data assimilation, forecasting technologies, and societal impacts and needs. Additional hands-on activities permit active learning through case studies that can become active research topics for participants.
Funding for the workshop has broader impacts in three ways: first, by bringing together an international group of researchers and forecasters to advance international cooperation in an important scientific area; second, by contributing to the education of students and early-career scientists to develop the next generation of the scientific workforce in this area; and third, by helping to advance the state of the science in an area that has tremendous societal relevance, given the large segment of the population living in areas that are at risk from landfalling hurricanes.
To share advanced understanding and forecasting techniques acquired in the recent by the tropical cyclone community in India and the US, a 6-days long advanced workshop and training was organized at Bhubaneshwar, Odisha, India during 9 - 14 July 2012.The primary objective of this NSF project was to facilitate the participation of 4 US doctoral students / young scientists in this workshop. Tropical cyclones continue to be one of the dominant natural hazards that affect the socioeconomic vulnerability of a region. Tropical cyclone genesis, evolution, intensification and eventual dissipation including the assessment of landfall threats such as storm induced tornadoes, flooding, and other societal hazards continue to be topics of active research. Some of the deadliest tropical cyclones have occurred in the Indian seas (Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea). As a result, community efforts directed to understanding and improving tropical cyclone forecasting in the Indian monsoon region can not only significantly reduce the loss of life and property and also help improve the models that are applied for tropical cyclone forecasts across the globe. In October 2010, NOAA signed an Implementing Arrangement (IA) and MoU with Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), Govt. of India to improve tropical cyclone forecasting over the Indian seas. Under this IA, NOAA has transferred the state-of-the art operational Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF) modeling system to India Meteorological Department (IMD) and its partnering research institution, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT-D). This event was jointly sponsored by Indo-US Science and Technology Forum (IUSSTF), Indian Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), MoES, US NOAA and US National Science Foundation (NSF). The US graduate doctoral students/young scientists actively participated in this unique workshop opportunity on the coast of Bay of Bengal – a region with high propensity for some of the most severe and deadly tropical cyclones globally. The participants benefitted from the lectures, the international experience, and have become a part of a tropical cyclone- monsoon research community. Additionally, the participants could provide feedback on the presentation material and become active contributors to the lecture notes making the material relevant to the US classroom teaching. In addition to the experience and human resource development, an important impact of the workshop is a consolidated resource that combines these lecture notes and lectures material that is being made available to the students, academics, and the operational community.
