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 return on the DTC’s investment.
To address this concern, an additional type of support, targeted to this select group of active developers, has been launched by the DTC with support from the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP). Through the HWRF developers’ website (http://www.dtcenter.org/HurrWRF/developers), scientists external to EMC can request access to the HWRF code repositories, giving them access to retrieve and contribute to experimental codes. They can also obtain information about the HWRF code management process and the steps to get their code made available for consideration by EMC. Finally, scientists can get training on advanced HWRF aspects not made available to the general community, such as the HWRF build system and HWRF automation with the Rocoto Workflow Manager System.
This new DTC service, which goes well beyond what is provided to the general community through public releases, has been extensively used by many HWRF developers, and has been particularly helpful to the principal investigators funded by HFIP.
