Promises in Air-Sea Fully Coupled Data Assimilation for Future Hurricane Prediction

The recent article by Li and Toumi (2018, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL079677) published in Geophysical Research Letters explored the potential for improving tropical cyclone intensity forecasts by assimilating synthetic coastal surface currents from high-frequency radar observations. Although it is an idealized study using simulated observations, this may signal the beginning of a new frontier in future hurricane prediction through ingesting in situ and remotely sensed observations of oceanic currents into fully coupled systems. Assimilation of oceanic observations can improve not only the state estimation of both oceanic and atmospheric variables but it also has the potential to better estimate uncertain model physics' parameters such as the air-sea exchange coefficients.