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

2020-10-05 | The Developmental Testbed Center is pleased to announce the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) v4.1.0 public release on October 5, 2020. This release contains the three elements of the CCPP: the CCPP-Physics, a library of physical parameterizations, the CCPP-Framework, an infrastructure  that connects the physics to host models, and the CCPP Single Column Model, a simple host model that employs the CCPP-Physics and CCPP-Framework. A complete list of capabilities associated with the CCPP v4 series can be found here.… Read More

Summer 2020 | The community aspect of NOAA’s Unified Forecast System (UFS) is off to a strong start with the release of the UFS Medium-Range Weather Application v1.0 on 11 March 2020.  The planning and preparations for this release were truly a community effort that convened a multi-institutional team of scientists and software engineers from NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), NOAA research laboratories (Global Systems Laboratory [GSL], National Severe Storms Laboratory [NSSL], Physical… Read More

Summer 2020 | This is an exciting era in Earth system prediction research and operational forecasting. Researchers are gaining access to a powerful set of tools that are deployed or soon to be used to produce the nation’s weather forecasts, climate outlooks, and more. Operational forecasters are gaining more direct access to the latest breakthroughs and innovations in modeling and prediction research. Here’s why I am so enthusiastic. … Read More

Summer 2020 | Lindsay Blank joined the DTC as an Associate Scientist in January 2018; this is her first career position in the field after completing school. She grew up in the D.C. area of Maryland, and earned her  B.S. in Meteorology and B.S. in Computer Science at Millersville University in Millersville, Pennsylvania. Her Computer Science degree was added  in her junior year of college after interning at the National Severe Storms Lab in Norman, Oklahoma where she was introduced to numerical… Read More

Summer 2020 | The Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) is a library of physical parameterizations distributed with a framework that enables its use in any host model that incorporates CCPP into their own structure. CCPP is currently used with NOAA’s Unified Forecast System (UFS) for experimental subseasonal-to-seasonal, medium- and short-range weather, air quality, and hurricane applications, with all physics development for the UFS transitioned to CCPP. The CCPP framework was originally developed by DTC, and is now being co-… Read More

Summer 2020 | Background  The Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) is a variational data assimilation system (DAS) used by several operational centers. GSI is used by NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5), as well as NOAA’s Global Forecast… Read More

Summer 2020 |

Summer 2020 | A workflow enabling users to run the atmospheric component of the Unified Forecast System regional configuration (FV3-LAM) in an end-to-end capacity will soon be available to the broader community. This community workflow is the result of a coordinated effort between EMC, GSL, and DTC. Components of the workflow include experiment generation, Rocoto XML file generation, and the scripts necessary to run pre-processing, model integration, and post- processing. Collaboration across multiple labs fostered the development of… Read More

2020-08-11 | The enhanced Model Evaluation Tools (METplus) development team at the DTC is pleased to announce the release of the multi-component verification capability called METplus.  It includes METplus version 3.1, MET version 9.1 and METviewer version 3.1. METplus contains a suite of Python wrappers and ancillary scripts to enhance the user's ability to quickly set-up and run MET.  METviewer is a database and display system for aggregating and plotting MET output.  Users can now check everything out and build through the… Read More

2020-03-31 | The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is pleased to announce the release of the Unified Post Processor Version 4.1.  While many of the functionalities and supported features remain the same as previous versions, there are significant modifications that support a larger goal to further align the community distributed code with National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) operations. The changes to the UPP in the current release reflect this effort and can be viewed as a transitional phase as work continues toward… Read More

2020-03-16 | The Model Evaluation Tools (MET) development team at the DTC is pleased to announce the release of a multi-component verification capability called METplus.  It includes METplus version 3.0, MET version 9.0 and METviewer version 3.0. METplus contains a suite of Python wrappers and ancillary scripts to enhance the user's ability to quickly set-up and run MET.  METviewer is a database and display system for aggregating and plotting MET output.  Users can now check everything out and build… Read More

2020-03-16 | The Developmental Testbed Center is pleased to announce the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) v4.0.0 public release on March 16, 2020. The CCPP contains a library of physical parameterizations (CCPP-Physics), and the framework that connects it to host models (CCPP-Framework). This release also includes the CCPP Single Column Model (SCM) v4.0.0.  Five experimental cases are available for use with the CCPP SCM: BOMEX maritime shallow convection, LASSO continental shallow convection, ASTEX stratocumulus-to-cumulus… Read More

Autumn 2019 | 100th AMS Annual Meeting in historic Boston, Massachusetts, from 12 to 16 January 2020