At a COSMIC science meeting in Taiwan in Nov 2006, Ying-Hwa Kuo of NCAR showed an even more dramatic result in which they applied 15 RO profiles to a trial forecast of hurricane Ernesto, which struck Cuba and Florida in 2006. They began their forecast while Ernesto was still a tropical depression in the southern Caribbean. The RO profiles changed the forecast from showing no significant storm arising over the next 102 hours to predicting the development and almost exact timing, strength, size, course, and speed of Ernesto over the full 102 hour forecast. While such results are still too few to lead to definitive conclusions, they are consistent with the comprehensive Healy result quantifying the enormous information content of GPS-RO profiles. With COSMIC delivering more than 2000 profiles/day we can soon expect to see many more results that will better characterize the impact of GPS-RO data on storm forecasts.
<-- Click to see NCAR forecast results for Hurricane Ernesto.