Autumn 2022 | The DTC was established in 2003 as a multi-agency effort with funding from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US Air Force, and the National Center For Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and has made its mark as the “clearing-house” for testing and evaluation (T&E) activities within the meteorological and associated Earth science community. As such, it provides a fundamental bridge between research and operations where cutting-edge ideas can be explored and vetted… Read More
Director's Corner: DTC Contributions to Other NOAA testbeds and the US Air Force Weather Enterprise
Christopher Melick
Who's Who: Molly Smith
Autumn 2022 | Molly Smith is one of DTC’s NOAA collaborators on our staff, and recently became one of the leads for METplus. Her background is in tropical meteorology, and she is the primary developer for the METexpress visualization system. Molly grew up in the chaparral on the edge of the Mojave Desert in Southern California. It does not rain very often in that part of the country, but when Molly was five, a strong El… Read More
Bridges to Operations: Single-Precision Physics in CCPP
Autumn 2022 | A constant struggle in NWP model design is the tradeoff between scientific improvements and computational cost. A method commonly used to balance that tradeoff is lowering some numerical calculations to single precision (or 32-bit calculations). Often, single-precision calculations have enough precision for physics, and they reduce disk storage, memory usage, and computation time. To apply single-precision calculations correctly, it is necessary to carefully evaluate and fine-tune… Read More
Community Connections: Continuous integration for community engagement in CCPP Physics code management
Autumn 2022 | Continuous integration (CI) is a software development practice where developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository whereby automated builds and tests are run. The key goals of continuous integration are to quickly find and address bugs, improve software quality, and reduce the time it takes to validate and release new software updates. The DTC Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) team has not only adopted CI for CCPP Physics code updates and releases, but… Read More
Did you know?: Registration is open for the 2023 Lapenta Internship
Autumn 2022 | NOAA is offering paid summer internships, named the 2023 Lapenta Internship, targeted towards current 2nd and 3rd-year undergraduate and enrolled graduate students to work in areas that will provide robust research and/or operational experience to prepare them for further study in NOAA fields, for application to fellowships, or for the NOAA-mission workforce. Projects may be focused on research areas or the… Read More
Did you know?: New UCAR and WPO fellowships for PhDs
Autumn 2022 | UCAR’s Cooperative Programs for the Advancement of Earth System Science (CPAESS) is excited to announce the launch of a new fellowship with NOAA's Weather Program Office (WPO): the WPO Innovation for Next Generation Scientists (WINGS) Dissertation Fellowship. The WINGS Fellowship is designed for Ph.D.… Read More
PROUD Award - Excellence in Action: Man Zhang, Research Scientist II CU/CIRES and NOAA GSL
Performance Recognition for OUtstanding DTC achievements (PROUD) Award
2022-11-14 | Man Zhang works for CU/CIRES at NOAA GSL and contributes to three DTC projects: Testing and Evaluation of Unified Forecast System (UFS) Physics for Operations, Toward a Unified Physics Package for the UFS Applications, and CCPP Software Support & Community Engagement. Man has gone above and beyond the call of duty to mentor a student during the Summer of 2022. It all started when she wrote about an idea for a short project, which caught the eye of CU Denver undergraduate student Jessica Paredes Saltijeral, a… Read More
Lead Story: Advances in the Rapid-Refresh Forecast System as Seen in NOAA’s Hazardous Weather Testbed’s Spring Forecasting Experiment
Summer 2022 | The Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) is a critical component of NOAA’s Unified Forecasting System (UFS) initiative which has been in development for several years and is planned for operational implementation in late 2024. The RRFS will provide the NWS an hourly updating, high-resolution ensemble capability that uses a state-of-the-art, convective-scale ensemble data assimilation and forecasting system with the Finite-Volume Cubed Sphere Dynamical core (FV3). Further, the RRFS will… Read More
Director's Corner: The era of funky grids, influence of interpolation, and the importance of community verification codes
Marion Mittermaier
Summer 2022 | Model intercomparison has always come with challenges, not least of all, the decisions such as which domain and grid to compare them on and the observations to compare them against. The latter also involves the often “hidden” decision about which interpolation to use. We interpolate our data almost without thinking about it and forget just how influential that decision might be. Let’s also add the software into the mix, because, in reality we need to. In 2019 the UK Met Office made the decision to adopt METplus as the… Read More
Who's Who: Will Mayfield
Summer 2022 | Will Mayfield began working with the DTC as a co-lead on the Data Assimilation (DA) team. His project focused on the Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) software. However, he recently transitioned into a co-lead for two projects: the Unified Forecast System (UFS) Short Range Weather (SRW) App support as well as Ensembles Testing and Evaluation. Successfully executing these roles demands a balance of software support, investigative science work, and project management. He has also collaborated on a variety of other… Read More
Bridges to Operations: Creation of an Agile RRFS Prototype Testing Framework to Inform and Accelerate Operational Implementation
Summer 2022 | Within the effort to unify the NCEP operational model suite, taking place under the Unified Forecast System (UFS) umbrella, a key area of interest is the evolution of legacy operational, convective-allowing systems to a new, unified Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere (FV3)-based deterministic and ensemble storm-scale system called the Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS). The ongoing transition from the existing NOAA NWP systems to the UFS is a major multi-year undertaking, with the RRFS targeted for initial operational… Read More
Visitors: Development of GSI Multiscale ENKF Data Assimilation for Convection-Allowing FV3 Limited Area Model
Visitor: Chong-Chi Tong
Summer 2022 | Accurately predicting weather down to the convective storm scales requires setting initial model conditions that accurately represent the atmospheric state at all scales (from the planetary through synoptic large-scale, mesoscale, to convective). The importance of these various interactions can not be overlooked. A well-performing data assimilation (DA) system must accurately analyze flow features at all scales. For this visitor project, a multi-scale DA capability within the GSI-… Read More
Community Connections: International Community Participates in First METplus Users’ Workshop
Summer 2022 | The first DTC METplus Users Workshop was held virtually June 27th through June 29th, 2022 covering a multitude of topics and application areas. METplus became an operational software tool for NOAA NCEP Central Operations in 2021 and provides a framework for all components needed to provide ease-of-use and diagnostic capability to the Model Evaluation Tools (MET) package first released by the DTC in 2008, which originally began through and continues to benefit from the generous support of the Air Force. The last MET… Read More
Did you know?: The METexpress Visualization Suite
Summer 2022 | A major advancement of the Unified Forecast System Research-to-Operations (UFS-R2O) project has been the implementation of the DTC’s advanced Model Evaluation Tools (METplus) as a unified verification system for community model-development efforts. A community verification tool is important for this sort of decentralized development endeavor, as it gives all participants a common framework for evidence-based decision making when transitioning these models to operations. METplus processes numerical weather prediction… Read More
Software Release: CCPP and CCPP SCM v6.0.0 release announcement
2022-06-29 | The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is pleased to announce the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) v6.0.0 public release on June 29,2022. This release contains the CCPP Physics, a library of physical parameterizations, the CCPP Framework, an infrastructure that connects the physics to host models, and the CCPP Single Column Model (SCM), a simple host model that employs the CCPP Physics and CCPP… Read More
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