Winter 2024 | The Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) is NOAA’s next-generation high-resolution, rapidly- updating ensemble prediction system that is underpinned by the Finite Volume Cubed Sphere (FV3) dynamical core of the Unified Forecast System (UFS). The RRFS has been in development over the past 5-7 years as part of a major collaborative effort between numerous organizations in NOAA, an ongoing partnership with the DTC, and academia.… Read More

Winter 2024 | As I near the end of my 31+ year career with NOAA, this is a wonderful (and timely) opportunity to reflect on the last (almost) 6 years of model development and DTC engagement. The last time I provided my perspective for a Director’s Corner was during the Summer of 2018. At that time, I had recently joined NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) and was excited at the prospect of moving toward community-based model development to enhance NWS’ operational numerical weather prediction (NWP… Read More

Winter 2024 | Eric Gilleland is a Project Scientist II with the Joint Numerical Testbed (JNT) at NSF NCAR. He lends his expertise to applying statistical methodology to a wide array of applications. In particular, he identifies trends in meteorological quantities within a climate context, designing new methods for comparing large spatial fields such as high-resolution weather forecast verification, and extensive work in extreme-value analysis. Eric also manages the highly successful DTC Visitor… Read More

Winter 2024 | Following the scientific and programmatic discussions surrounding a potential shift of the Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) toward using the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) dynamical core (Carley et al. 2024), a Tiger Team was formed to scope out the technical work needed to add a second… Read More

Winter 2024 | During their recent project for the DTC Visitor Program, Michael Iacono and John Henderson of Verisk - Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) used the newly operational Hurricane Analysis and Forecasting System (HAFS) to evaluate the impact of an improved method to represent the sub-grid variability and vertical overlap of partial cloudiness in radiative transfer calculations on tropical cyclone predictions. This work was an extended application of their exponential (EXP) cloud… Read More

Winter 2024 | The Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) single-column model (SCM) is developed and supported by the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC). In addition to periodic public releases, the CCPP SCM and its applications were introduced to the community in 2020 through an AMS Short Course “Experimentation and Development of Physical Parameterizations for Numerical Weather Prediction Using a Single-Column Model and the Common Community Physics Package” and a series of workshops and… Read More

Winter 2024 | The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) provides user support and feature enhancements for select Unified Forecast System (UFS) applications, models, and components. To request new UFS features or enhancements, post a request on the ufs-community GitHub Discussions page under Enhancement… Read More

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 that… Read More