Spring 2016 | The DTC hurricane team has provided training opportunities to learn the Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF) system to both general users and active developers over the past several months. The community HWRF modeling system (version 3.7a released in August 2015) is compatible with the NCEP 2015 operational implementation, which includes high-resolution deterministic tropical cyclone numerical guidance for all global oceanic basins. Due to the demonstrated skill and advanced… Read More

Winter 2016 |

Summer 2015 | The hybrid Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF)-Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) data assimilation system was implemented at NCEP for its Global Forecasting System (GFS) in May 2012.

Autumn 2013 | Unlike some other forecast model components, a data assimilation (DA) system is usually built to be flexible in order to be run by different forecast systems at varying scales. Its testing and evaluation must therefore be performed in the context of a specific application; in other words, it must be adaptable to different operational requirements as well as to research advances. Established in 2009, the DTC DA team started providing data assimilation support and testing and… Read More

Spring 2018 | A contribution by Karina Apodaca and coauthor Milija Zupanski on the work they conducted with the DTC Visitor Program on variational lightening data assimilation. This article covers highlights of their journal article. See, also, the link at the end of this article.

Spring 2016 | This past winter, the DTC had the pleasure of hosting visiting scientist Dr. Liantang Deng of the Numerical Weather Prediction Center, China Meteorological Administration (CMA). His visit stemmed from the combined Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) and Global/Regional Assimilation and PrEdiction System (GRAPES) modeling workshop in 2014, when Dr. Bill Kuo, Director of the DTC, helped facilitate interactions between the DTC and CMA. During his 2-month stay, he… Read More

Winter 2016 |

Spring 2018 | A major hurdle for running new software systems is often building and compiling the necessary code on a particular computer platform. In recent years, the concept of using “containers” has been gaining momentum in the numerical weather prediction (NWP) community. This new container technology allows for the complete software system to be bundled (operating system, libraries, code, etc.) and shipped to users in order to reduce the spin-up time, leading to a more efficient setup process. A core mission of the DTC is… Read More

Spring 2016 | A sea ice modeling workshop was convened on 3-4 February 2016 in Boulder, CO for the purpose of informing NOAA on the inclusion and selection of a community-contributed sea ice model into the future Next-Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS). Another workshop goal was to identify potential research and development opportunities and gaps. The workshop was hosted at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) by the DTC’s Global Model Test Bed, and counted as sponsors the National Weather Service, the NOAA… Read More

Winter 2015 | The mission of the DTC is to accelerate the rate of transition of new research and development to operational numerical weather prediction models. To that end, the DTC makes NCEP operational models, such as the Hurricane WRF, available to the general community through yearly releases of stable, well-tested, and well-documented codes, which are supported through a help desk. While the DTC has hundreds of registered HWRF users, only a small subset of them actually contribute innovations, raising questions about the… Read More

Autumn 2013 | Given its mission to facilitate the research to operations transition in numerical weather prediction, the DTC has a mandate to stay connected with both the research and operational NWP communities. As a means to that end, the DTC Science Advisory Board (SAB) was established to provide (i) advice on strategic directions, (ii) recommendations for new code or new NWP innovations for testing and evaluation, and (iii) reviews of DTC Visitor Program… Read More

Spring 2018 | Porting is the ability to move software from one environment to another by making minimal changes to the existing code. Unfortunately, such an arrangement is not easy to achieve when it comes to porting software from one Operating System (OS) platform to another or even among versions of a single OS.  Software containers are a solution to this problem. The software and its working environment are able to be ported from platform to platform, from a laptop to a desktop or HPC environment as a unit, single and… Read More

Summer 2015 | As a bridge between the research and operational NWP communities, one of the fundamental purposes of the DTC is to provide the research community access to functionally similar operational environments. Through this effort, promising new NWP techniques from the research community can be transferred more efficiently to an operational environment. One system that is currently under development and in the plans for operational implementation is the North American Mesoscale Rapid Refresh (NAMRR) system. The NAMRR is an… Read More

Winter 2015 | A successful workshop on Parameterization of Moist Processes for Next-Generation Weather Prediction Models was hosted by NOAA and DTC at the NOAA Center for Weather & Climate Prediction (NCWPC) in College Park, MD, Jan 27-29, 2015. A large number of participants from NOAA, the international operational community, and the research community gathered to discuss topics including microphysics, sub-grid scale clouds and turbulence, and deep convection. The first day of the workshop included two keynote presentations… Read More

Autumn 2013 | The Tropical Cyclone Modeling Team (TCMT) was formed as part RAL’s Joint Numerical Testbed (JNT) in 2009 to help assess hurricane and tropical storm forecasts from experimental models. As such, its members interact with the DTC in two particular ways: by designing methods and products appropriate for tropical cyclone verification that can be installed in maintained software at the DTC, and by providing both real-time and retrospective performance measures for each years’ hurricane forecasts. At a working… Read More