The Developmental Testbed Center used the Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF) system to test the sensitivity of tropical cyclone track and intensity forecasts to different convective schemes. A control configuration that employed the HWRF Simplified Arakawa Scheme (SAS) was compared with the Kain-Fritsch and Tiedtke schemes, as well as with a newer implementation of the SAS. A comprehensive test for Atlantic and Eastern North Pacific storms shows that the SAS scheme produces the best track forecasts. Even though the convective parameterization was absent in the inner 3 km nest, the intensity forecasts are sensitive to the choice of cumulus scheme on the outer grids. The impact of convective-scale heating on the environmental flow accumulates in time since the hurricane vortex is cycled in the HWRF model initialization. This study shows that, for a given forecast, the sensitivity to cumulus parameterization combines the influence of physics and initial conditions.
