Quantitative satellite applications - Tropical cyclone intensity monitoring and track forecasting

An assessment is made of the effectiveness of VISSR Atmospheric Sounder (VAS) data gathered over the North Atlantic Ocean area in the 1982 and 1983 hurricane seasons. By the end of the 1983 season, progress had been made in providing high quality analyses and displays of mass, motion and moisture patterns for evaluation. A comparison of mean forecast errors for several different operational models, official forecasts, and the VAS Trajectory model for selected cases in which VAS deep layer mean wind data were available show VAS accuracies that are comparable with those of the official forecasts.