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 hourly-updating version of the North American Mescoscale (NAM) forecast system, which is based on NOAA’s Environmental Modeling System (NEMS) Nonhydrostatic Multiscale Model on the B-grid (NMMB). In addition to the deterministic forecast guidance provided by NAMRR, it will also be a major contributor to the future Standard Resolution Ensemble Forecast (SREF) and High Resolution Ensemble Forecast (HREF) systems, along with the Rapid Refresh (RAP) and High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) systems, which are based on the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. The NAMRR system is being actively ported to the DTC. The configuration currently includes a 12-km North American parent domain and a 3-km CONUS nest, with plans to add a 3-km Alaska nest (Figure center of page). Future plans include providing support to the research community to run a functionally similar NAMRR environment.
