PROUD Award - Excellence in Action: HOWARD SOH, Software Engineer III, NSF NCAR RAL & DTC

Performance Recognition for OUtstanding DTC achievements (PROUD) Award

2024-02-27 | Howard Soh is a Software Engineer III with the NSF NCAR Research Applications Laboratory who contributes to the development and support of the Model Evaluation Tools (MET) statistical component of the METplus system at the DTC. Howard splits his time between the National Security Applications Program (NSAP) and the Joint Numerical Testbed (JNT), but his contributions to METplus far exceed expectations for… Read More

Lead Story: NOAA’s New Fire Weather Testbed and DTC Fire Weather Verification

Autumn 2023 | With wildfires increasingly impacting society and ecosystems spanning local to global scales, NOAA has expanded its strategic investments and plans to address wildfire-related hazards. In 2023, NOAA established a new Fire Weather Testbed (FWT), Read More

Director's Corner: Dr. Steven Lack and Dr. Bonnie Brown

Autumn 2023 | The U.S. Air Force’s partnership with the DTC dates back to 2003 and one of the main areas of collaboration has been the advancement of scientific and technical research into a community-backed set of tools for model verification known as Model Evaluation Tools (MET) and its subsequent evolution into the METplus suite of tools. The USAF has provided financial as well as in-kind participation in governance to the DTC and in return benefits from the expansion of this tool set across many… Read More

Who's Who: Dustin Swales

Autumn 2023 | Dustin Swales works for NOAA-GSL where his primary role is leading the development of the CCPP Framework, the physics coupling infrastructure used by NOAA UFS applications. The Framework is used by a wide range of users beyond NOAA, and so a significant piece of this role requires working closely with collaborators at NCAR to develop this Framework across modeling applications. Tangential to this, he works on CCPP Physics development, the physical parameterizations enabled by the… Read More

Community Connections: The Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) Visioning Workshop

Autumn 2023 | The Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) Visioning Workshop, which took place virtually on August 15-17 of 2023, convened discussions focused on the current status and future direction of the CCPP. The workshop was organized by a multi-institutional committee composed of representatives from DTC (Grant Firl, Lulin Xue, Dustin Swales, Ligia Bernardet), NCAR’s Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology (Laura Fowler) and Climate and Global Dynamics (Courtney Peverley) Laboratories,… Read More

Did you know?: Events and Opportunities

Autumn 2023 | Upcoming Events Attending AGU or AMS and interested in learning more about what the DTC staff are up to?  Check out these presentations! 2023 AGU Annual Meeting Dec 13 Impact of ensemble design on the development of the… Read More

Bridges to Operations: METplus in Operations

Autumn 2023 | During the first few years of the DTC, the United States Air Force (USAF) put forth a vision for the DTC to develop a suite for verification tools that would provide reproducible results such that statistics and metrics could be shared across institutions.  The USAF envisioned a suite of tools that would include both standard verification approaches, as well as advanced diagnostic methodologies.  In 2008, the DTC released the software package, Model Evaluation Tools (MET) to the… Read More

Visitors: Cristiana Stan and Loren Doyle

Autumn 2023 | Cristiana Stan of George Mason University originally proposed a very exciting and new type of DTC visitor project that involved holding a “hack-a-thon” where teams of two graduate students would be tasked with selecting and developing a METplus Use Case for one of the subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) metrics identified during the 2021 DTC UFS Evaluation Metrics Workshop.  The winning team would then be given the opportunity to visit the DTC for up to three months to collaborate with the… Read More

PROUD Award - Excellence in Action: GRANT FIRL, Research Scientist II, CSU/CIRA at NOAA GSL & DTC

Performance Recognition for OUtstanding DTC achievements (PROUD) Award

2023-11-28 | Grant Firl is a Research Scientist II (more specifically, an Atmospheric Physics Development and Implementation Research Scientist) with the CSU/CIRA at NOAA GSL, contributing to the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) project at the DTC. Grant was the foundational developer of the CCPP Single-Column Model (SCM). He wrote and documented the entire SCM from scratch, which required the scientific understanding of how an SCM works and the technical skill to code in both Fortran and Python. He then connected several… Read More

Did you know?: Internship Opportunity

Summer 2023 | The Lapenta internship invites undergraduate (sophomore and junior) as well as graduate students from all STEM disciplines (marine science, atmospheric science, engineering, social science, applied math, etc) to participate in 10-week (early June to mid August) projects that span all five line offices and the Office of Marine and Aviation Operations. These projects are high-impact, short-term research-to-operations (R2O) efforts where students learn coding and networking side-by-side… Read More

PROUD Award - Excellence in Action: Kate Fossell, Associate Scientist IV, NCAR/MMM and DTC

Performance Recognition for OUtstanding DTC achievements (PROUD) Award

2023-08-22 | Kate Fossell is an Associate Scientist IV in MMM at NCAR, contributing to two DTC projects; the Unified Post Processor (UPP) and the Numerical Weather Prediction cloud container projects. Kate has worked with the DTC for 10 years with much of her time dedicated to co-leading the UPP project and its growing team through its transition to the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) in 2023. During this period, she built a strong collaborative relationship with the UPP team at the NOAA Environmental Modeling Center (EMC… Read More

Software Release: METplus v5.1 Coordinated Release

2023-08-01 | The DTC is pleased to announce the release of the multi-component verification framework called the enhanced Model Evaluation Tools (METplus), or METplus. METplus contains a suite of Python wrappers and ancillary scripts to enhance the user's ability to quickly set-up and run MET. METplus also has an analysis suite including METviewer and METexpress user interfaces and METdataio, METcalcpy, and METplotpy as shared packages for loading and storing MET output as well as aggregating and… Read More

Lead Story: CCPP Goes Operational

Spring 2023 | The Hurricane Analysis and Prediction System (HAFS) v1 has been approved for operational implementation for the 2023 hurricane season by NOAA NCEP and, with it, the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) will be deployed operationally for the first time. This is a major milestone for this software infrastructure. The first set of requirements for the CCPP was established in 2017, following… Read More

Director's Corner: Jennifer Mahoney

Spring 2023 | The DTC serves a vital role in advancing NOAA’s modeling efforts and the community-based Unified Forecasting System (UFS). The DTC is research to operations (R20) and operations to research (O2R) in action. Through model evaluations and support to the community, the impact of the DTC in the delivery of new… Read More

Who's Who: Xia Sun

Spring 2023 | Xia Sun is a numerical weather prediction (NWP) scientist working at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder (CIRES) and NOAA Global Systems Laboratory. Xia works on hierarchical system development for the Unified Forecast System (UFS) and MYNN-EDMF planetary boundary layer (PBL) physics scheme. Before that, Xia lived in Reno, Nevada for three and… Read More