Winter 2021 | The three-day HFIP Annual Meeting 2020 was held virtually on November 17-19, 2020. Approximately 130 participants from NOAA line offices, DTC, NCAR, and university partners participated in the meeting. NOAA/NWS/OSTI Modeling Program Division Director Dr. Dorothy Koch kicked off the meeting with welcoming remarks. Day one focused on HFIP programmatic updates, a discussion of forecasters' needs and current activities supporting operations and a summary of the results from the forecasters' HFIP display survey.  Day two… Read More

Winter 2021 | In 2017, Congress instructed NOAA to establish the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) to advance “observational, computing, and modeling capabilities to support substantial improvement in weather forecasting and prediction of high impact weather events.”  What will the details of EPIC look like?  EPIC has not yet been formed, so the community doesn’t know, and it’s not yet clear that NOAA knows either.  Hopefully, it can achieve its goal to improve accessibility to the operational code and data so that scientists… Read More

Winter 2021 | Many of you may know Tatiana Burek as the developer and gatekeeper of METviewer, the visualization software for the verification package developed and supported by the DTC, but her life took a series of turns to arrive at the DTC. She grew up in Leningrad, Russia where she spent her childhood as a passionate competitor, both as a speed skater and swimmer, all while attending rigorous dance classes. Undaunted by year-round swim team practice sessions in the outdoor pool, whose coach… Read More

Winter 2021 | The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC), in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Unified Forecast System's Verification and Validation Cross-Cutting Team (UFS-V&V), is hosting a three-day workshop to identify key verification and validation metrics for UFS applications.  The workshop will be held remotely 22-24 February, 2021. Approximately 275 participants have registered for this event from across the research and operational… Read More

Winter 2021 | The DTC, in cooperation with subject-matter experts from NOAA's Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), as well as NCAR’s Climate and Global Dynamics (CGD) Laboratory hosted a live, virtual training session for the Unified Forecast System (UFS) Medium-Range Weather (MRW) Application 4-6 November and… Read More

Winter 2021 | NOAA’s Big Data Program (BDP) is providing public access to NOAA's open data on commercial cloud platforms through public-private partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. NOAA generates tens of terabytes of data a day from observations like satellites, radars, and buoys, and from weather models, and other sources. Did you know the available datasets include: UFS Coupled Model Prototype 5 (S2SP5), which is the latest experimental version of the UFS coupled atmosphere-ocean-sea ice… Read More

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