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

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

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

Autumn 2013 | Given its mission to facilitate the research to operations transition in numerical weather prediction, the DTC has a mandate to stay connected with both the research and operational NWP communities. As a means to that end, the DTC Science Advisory Board (SAB) was established to provide (i) advice on strategic directions, (ii) recommendations for new code or new NWP innovations for testing and evaluation, and (iii) reviews of DTC Visitor Program… 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… Read More

Summer 2015 | As a bridge between the research and operational NWP communities, one of the fundamental purposes of the DTC is to provide the research community access to functionally similar operational environments. Through this effort, promising new NWP techniques from the research community can be transferred more efficiently to an operational environment. One system that is currently under development and in the plans for operational implementation is the North American Mesoscale Rapid Refresh (NAMRR) system. The NAMRR is an… Read More

Winter 2015 | A successful workshop on Parameterization of Moist Processes for Next-Generation Weather Prediction Models was hosted by NOAA and DTC at the NOAA Center for Weather & Climate Prediction (NCWPC) in College Park, MD, Jan 27-29, 2015. A large number of participants from NOAA, the international operational community, and the research community gathered to discuss topics including microphysics, sub-grid scale clouds and turbulence, and deep convection. The first day of the workshop included two keynote presentations… Read More