Who's Who: Michelle Harrold

Winter 2016 |

Who's Who: Jeff Beck

Summer 2015 |

Who's Who: Ming Hu

Winter 2015 | Ming is one of several DTC scientists with cross-Pacific ties, with early roots in central China (near Xian) and school and work experience in Jiangsu (where his parents live), the Nanjing Institute of Meteorology, Beijing, and the University of Oklahoma, where he earned his PhD in 2005. Since 2007 he has been working at ESRL/GSD in Boulder. One of the go-to people for data assimilation work at the DTC and at GSD with the RAP/HRRR, he is called upon not only for development work on data assimilation… Read More

Who's Who: Hui Shao

Autumn 2013 | In many ways, Hui is the quintessential DTC lead. Stationed at NCEP’s Environmental Modeling Center but spending several weeks a year in Boulder, she lives R2O (data assimilation variety) day in and day out. Besides the frequent commutes, she is a long-distance veteran in another way, with undergraduate and masters’ level education in China, a PhD at Florida State, and now her dual appointment of sorts in DC and Boulder. There was some chance at Nanjing University that she would follow a different career: space science… Read More

Bridges to Operations: DTC MET Verification Tutorial

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

Bridges to Operations: HWRF Training at Home and Abroad

Spring 2016 | The DTC hurricane team has provided training opportunities to learn the Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF) system to both general users and active developers over the past several months. The community HWRF modeling system (version 3.7a released in August 2015) is compatible with the NCEP 2015 operational implementation, which includes high-resolution deterministic tropical cyclone numerical guidance for all global oceanic basins. Due to the demonstrated skill and advanced… Read More

Bridges to Operations: HWRF Operational Implementation and Public Release

Winter 2016 |

Bridges to Operations: Data Assimilation Study for TC Intensity

Summer 2015 | The hybrid Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF)-Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) data assimilation system was implemented at NCEP for its Global Forecasting System (GFS) in May 2012.

Bridges to Operations: Support for Operational DA at AFWA

Autumn 2013 | Unlike some other forecast model components, a data assimilation (DA) system is usually built to be flexible in order to be run by different forecast systems at varying scales. Its testing and evaluation must therefore be performed in the context of a specific application; in other words, it must be adaptable to different operational requirements as well as to research advances. Established in 2009, the DTC DA team started providing data assimilation support and testing and… Read More

Visitors: Variational lightning data assimilation in GSI

Visitor: Milija Zupanski

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.

Visitors: DTC Visitor Project

Visitor: Liantang Deng

Spring 2016 | This winter of 2015-2016, the DTC had the pleasure of hosting visiting scientist Dr. Liantang Deng of the Numerical Weather Prediction Center, China Meteorological Administration (CMA). His visit stemmed from the combined Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) and Global/Regional Assimilation and PrEdiction System (GRAPES) modeling workshop in 2014, when Dr. Bill Kuo, Director of the DTC, helped facilitate interactions between the DTC and CMA. During his 2-month stay, he… Read More

Visitors: Implementation and Validation of a Geo-Statistical Observation Operator for the Assimilation of Near Surface Winds in GSI

Visitor: Joël Bédard

Winter 2016 | As a 2015 DTC visitor, Joël Bédard is working with Josh Hacker to apply a geo-statistical observation operator for the assimilation of near-surface winds in GSI for the NCEP Rapid Refresh (RAP) regional forecasting system. Biases and representativeness errors limit the global influence of near-surface wind observations. Although many near-surface wind observations over land are available from the global observing system, they had not been used in data assimilation systems until recently and many are still unused. Winds… Read More

Community Connections: DTC staff host AMS Short Course on Containers

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… Read More

Community Connections: Sea Ice Modeling Workshop

Spring 2016 | A sea ice modeling workshop was convened on 3-4 February 2016 in Boulder, CO for the purpose of informing NOAA on the inclusion and selection of a community-contributed sea ice model into the future Next-Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS). Another workshop goal was to identify potential research and development opportunities and gaps. The workshop was hosted at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) by the DTC’s Global Model Test Bed, and counted as sponsors the National Weather Service, the NOAA… Read More

Community Connections: New HWRF Developers Website: R2O for Hurricane Model Development

Winter 2015 | 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… Read More