2020-12-10 | The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is pleased to announce the release of the METexpress application, Version 3.0.1 (dated Oct. 7, 2020).  METexpress is a simplified data analysis visualization component of the enhanced Model Evaluation Tools (METplus) verification system.     Download & Installation To download this version of METexpress… Read More

Autumn 2020 | Verification and validation activities are critical to the success of modeling and prediction efforts ongoing at organizations around the world.  Having reproducible results via a consistent framework is equally important for model developers and users alike.  The Model Evaluation Tools (MET) was developed over a decade ago by the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) and expanded to the METplus framework with a view towards providing… Read More

Autumn 2020 | The U.S. Air Force (USAF) partnership with the DTC has provided superb value to the USAF over the years, as this collaboration dates back as far as 2003.  Early in the relationship, the DTC benefited the USAF-NCAR partnership with WRF development and transition to USAF operations.  In recent years, the DTC has focused primarily on USAF needs for model evaluation through continued development of the Model Evaluation Tools (MET), along with project efforts related to model testing and evaluation (T&E).  Throughout this… Read More

Autumn 2020 | Ivette Hernández Baños

Autumn 2020 | The Developmental Testbed Center has developed a set of instructional training videos. Two videos are now available to familiarize the NWP development community with the UFS code and the Medium-Range Weather (MRW) App v1.0. UFS Code Repositories describes the overall structure of the Medium-Range Weather Application ("MRW App") source code repositories, directory structures, and where to find further documentation. Raw Initial Conditions for the UFS Medium-Range Weather Application v1.0 describes the formats of raw… Read More

Autumn 2020 | Keith Searight joined the DTC in June as NOAA GSL’s co-lead for the Model Evaluation Tools (METplus) verification system, which is becoming the unified verification, validation, and diagnostics software for the Unified Forecast System (UFS). He also performs DTC-wide project management duties for GSL, such as project tracking, budgets, and reporting. Previous to this job, he was NOAA’s technical lead for Science On… Read More

Autumn 2020 | The Hurricane Weather Research and Forecast system (HWRF), which is one of NOAA’s operational models used to predict the track, intensity, and structure of tropical cyclones, undergoes an upgrade cycle that is generally conducted on an annual basis.  Through the code management and developer support framework provided by the DTC, innovations from the research community that have been added to branches within the HWRF code repository serve as candidates for testing as part of these upgrade cycles. Scientists at NOAA’s… Read More

Autumn 2020 | Jamie Wolff, the lead of the software containers and cloud computing task in the DTC, contacted me in the Spring of 2019 about a unique opportunity to collaborate on a course that would offer interested students at Metropolitan State University an opportunity to run and experiment with an end-to-end numerical weather prediction (NWP) system utilizing cloud computing. The motivation behind this collaboration was to introduce undergraduates of a bachelor’s degree Meteorology program to NWP in a stress-free environment in… Read More

2020-10-06 | The UFS Medium-Range Application v1.1.0 was publicly released on 10/06/2020. This is a minor release of the system that predicts atmospheric behavior out to about two weeks. New capabilities in this release include the ability to ingest GFS raw initial conditions in netCDF format (to be introduced with GFSv16), flexibility to customize the post processor output, and safeguards against occasional extreme sea surface temperatures present in the initial conditions. This release is compatible with Python 3 and with recent… Read More

2020-10-05 | The Developmental Testbed Center is pleased to announce the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) v4.1.0 public release on October 5, 2020. This release contains the three elements of the CCPP: 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, a simple host model that employs the CCPP-Physics and CCPP-Framework. A complete list of capabilities associated with the CCPP v4 series can be found here.… Read More

Summer 2020 | The community aspect of NOAA’s Unified Forecast System (UFS) is off to a strong start with the release of the UFS Medium-Range Weather Application v1.0 on 11 March 2020.  The planning and preparations for this release were truly a community effort that convened a multi-institutional team of scientists and software engineers from NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), NOAA research laboratories (Global Systems Laboratory [GSL], National Severe Storms Laboratory [NSSL], Physical… Read More

Summer 2020 | This is an exciting era in Earth system prediction research and operational forecasting. Researchers are gaining access to a powerful set of tools that are deployed or soon to be used to produce the nation’s weather forecasts, climate outlooks, and more. Operational forecasters are gaining more direct access to the latest breakthroughs and innovations in modeling and prediction research. Here’s why I am so enthusiastic. … Read More

Summer 2020 | Lindsay Blank joined the DTC as an Associate Scientist in January 2018; this is her first career position in the field after completing school. She grew up in the D.C. area of Maryland, and earned her  B.S. in Meteorology and B.S. in Computer Science at Millersville University in Millersville, Pennsylvania. Her Computer Science degree was added  in her junior year of college after interning at the National Severe Storms Lab in Norman, Oklahoma where she was introduced to numerical… Read More

Summer 2020 | The Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) is a library of physical parameterizations distributed with a framework that enables its use in any host model that incorporates CCPP into their own structure. CCPP is currently used with NOAA’s Unified Forecast System (UFS) for experimental subseasonal-to-seasonal, medium- and short-range weather, air quality, and hurricane applications, with all physics development for the UFS transitioned to CCPP. The CCPP framework was originally developed by DTC, and is now being co-… Read More

Summer 2020 | Background  The Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) is a variational data assimilation system (DAS) used by several operational centers. GSI is used by NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5), as well as NOAA’s Global Forecast… Read More