Summer 2018 | The Hurricane Weather Research and Forecast system (HWRF) is one of NOAA’s operational models used to predict the track, intensity, and structure of tropical cyclones. Each winter, scientists at NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC), and NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division (HRD) perform testing and evaluation (T&E) on possible changes to the HWRF physics schemes, dynamic core, and data assimilation system that have the potential to improve HWRF predictions. Many of these… Read More

Summer 2018 | Advection is a computationally expensive process in Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models. Therefore, time-sensitive operational forecast models sometimes sum up the hydrometeors, including cloud water, rainwater, ice and snow, prior to calling the advection scheme. For this configuration, the model only needs to calculate the advection of the total condensate. However, the impact of such a time-saving technique has not been systematically evaluated. With the release of HWRF 3.9a, a version of the operational HWRF… Read More

Summer 2018 | The 2018 DTC Community Unified Forecast System Test Plan and Metrics Workshop was held at NOAA’s National Center for Weather and Climate Prediction (NCEP) on July 30 - August 1, 2018. The major goal of this workshop was to work towards a community test plan with common validation and verification metrics for the emerging Unified Forecast System (UFS). The plan will serve as a guide for the Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) community for testing and evaluating new developments for the UFS models and components by comparison… Read More

2018-05-01 | The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is pleased to announce an upcoming community workshop on Numerical Weather Prediction test plan and metrics for model validation and verification. Now available: Agenda | Registration | Logistics The workshop, to take place at the NCWCP in College Park, MD, will be held for two and a half days prior to the NGGPS Strategic Implementation Planning (SIP) meeting at the same location. The major goal of this workshop is to develop a community test plan with common validation and… Read More

2018-04-13 | The DTC’s HWRF team is pleased to announce the public release of the Community standalone GFDL Vortex Tracker code version 3.9a. The standalone tracker can be used to determine properties (location, intensity, structure etc) of forecast tropical cyclones… Read More

2018-04-09 | The DTC’s Global Model Test Bed (GMTB) is pleased to announce the public release of the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP), a library of physical parameterizations for atmospheric numerical models. It is distributed with a framework that enables its use with any host application for which an interface is written. In this release, the CCPP has been bundled with the GMTB Single Column Model (SCM) and contains all the physical parameterizations used in the current operational NOAA Global Forecast System (GFS). For more… Read More

Spring 2018 | The “Building a Weather-Ready Nation by Transitioning Academic Research to NOAA Operations” Workshop was held at the NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction in College Park, Maryland, on November 1-2, 2017. NOAA and UCAR organized the meeting that drew more than one hundred participants from universities, government laboratories, operational centers, and the private sector. Members of the organizing committee included Reza Khanbilvardi, City College of New York, Chandra Kondragunta, NOAA/OAR, Jennifer Mahoney, NOAA/… Read More

Spring 2018 | As chief of the Model Development Branch (MDB) at NOAA’s Global System Division (GSD), I am honored to work with many of the scientists from the DTC. The DTC has been a vital partner for the development, testing, and evaluation of the Rapid Refresh (RAP) and High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) models, and I look forward to continuing this valuable collaboration as the community works together to define and develop the next-generation modeling system.  The work performed in my branch at GSD is strongly linked to the five… Read More

Spring 2018 | The long and winding path to becoming an atmospheric scientist began at a young age for Grant, like many atmospheric scientists. He split his childhood years between watching occasional storms develop over the Sandia Mountains of Albuquerque, NM and the frequent passing of MCSs (Mesoscale Convective Systems) and derechos over the forested hills of southwest Missouri. Grant credits his interest in science and math to a string of inspirational teachers from elementary school and onward, but his… Read More

Spring 2018 | The  DTC Verification team hosted a MET tutorial at NCAR January 31-February 2, 2018 in association with the semi-annual WRF tutorial. This event was the first in-residence MET tutorial since February 2015. There were 31 registered users and several new DTC staff dropped in for pertinent lectures.  The tutorial included a half day of lectures on verification basics plus two and a half days of presentations focused on many of the MET tools supplemented with practical sessions that demonstrated the tool.  … Read More

Spring 2018 | A contribution by Karina Apodaca and coauthor Milija Zupanski on the work they conducted with the DTC Visitor Program on variational lightening data assimilation. This article covers highlights of their journal article. See, also, the link at the end of this article.

Spring 2018 | A major hurdle for running new software systems is often building and compiling the necessary code on a particular computer platform. In recent years, the concept of using “containers” has been gaining momentum in the numerical weather prediction (NWP) community. This new container technology allows for the complete software system to be bundled (operating system, libraries, code, etc.) and shipped to users in order to reduce the spin-up time, leading to a more efficient setup process. A core mission of the DTC is to… Read More

Spring 2018 | Porting is the ability to move software from one environment to another by making minimal changes to the existing code. Unfortunately, such an arrangement is not easy to achieve when it comes to porting software from one Operating System (OS) platform to another or even among versions of a single OS.  Software containers are a solution to this problem. The software and its working environment are able to be ported from platform to platform, from a laptop to a desktop or HPC environment as a unit, single and complete.… Read More

2017-12-05 | The MET development team at the DTC is pleased to announce the release of the MET version 6.1 verification package. It is available for download from the MET Users web page. The MET development team significantly enhanced the run-time performance of a number of tools, enhanced the data and file format capabilities, and added new capabilities for point observations, gridded analyses and tropical cyclone and probabilistic verification. Full details about the… Read More

Autumn 2017 | "Entraining a vibrant, diverse external community into NCEP global model development will bring broader dividends. ....Surely the U.S. can marshal its intellectual resources to do even better and create the world's best unified modeling system using the GMTB as a collaborative platform." Read More