Winter 2015 | The DTC was established a number of years ago to facilitate the transition of new capabilities in weather forecasting from research to operations (R2O), with a focus on the WRF model. Over the years, many things have changed – for example, the DTC now works with multiple sets of code (WRF, GSI, MET, HWRF, and so on) which will soon include global prediction systems – but that fundamental mission remains the same. The DTC accomplishes its goals through strong connections to the operational and research… Read More

Autumn 2013 | The Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA) has long been a partner with the DTC since its “unofficial” early days of “core testing” (remember those), to its official charter membership signing in September of 2009, to date. Air Force Weather (AFW) recognized early, the essential role this organization could, and would, play in bolstering and mitigating an ever-growing US Air Force resource constrained terrestrial weather RDT&E environment. Further partnering with our NOAA National Centers for Environmental… 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… Read More

Spring 2016 | Circumstances can make it hard to connect with people, and with snowstorms and parent-teacher conferences, catching up with Chunhua Zhou took a few tries. But meeting her and learning about her work in the DTC made the effort worthwhile. Chunhua and her younger brother grew up in central China. While he still lives there and runs a small business, Chunhua went to the University of Hawaii in 2003, receiving her Ph.D. in Meteorology in 2009. Her thesis studies involved the dynamics of the tropical intraseasonal oscillation… Read More

Winter 2016 |

Summer 2015 |

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

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

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 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

Winter 2016 |

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.

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

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.