Lead Story: NOAA’s New Fire Weather Testbed and DTC Fire Weather Verification

Autumn 2023 | With wildfires increasingly impacting society and ecosystems spanning local to global scales, NOAA has expanded its strategic investments and plans to address wildfire-related hazards. In 2023, NOAA established a new Fire Weather Testbed (FWT), Read More

Director's Corner: Dr. Steven Lack and Dr. Bonnie Brown

Autumn 2023 | The U.S. Air Force’s partnership with the DTC dates back to 2003 and one of the main areas of collaboration has been the advancement of scientific and technical research into a community-backed set of tools for model verification known as Model Evaluation Tools (MET) and its subsequent evolution into the METplus suite of tools. The USAF has provided financial as well as in-kind participation in governance to the DTC and in return benefits from the expansion of this tool set across many… Read More

Who's Who: Dustin Swales

Autumn 2023 | Dustin Swales works for NOAA-GSL where his primary role is leading the development of the CCPP Framework, the physics coupling infrastructure used by NOAA UFS applications. The Framework is used by a wide range of users beyond NOAA, and so a significant piece of this role requires working closely with collaborators at NCAR to develop this Framework across modeling applications. Tangential to this, he works on CCPP Physics development, the physical parameterizations enabled by the… Read More

Community Connections: The Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) Visioning Workshop

Autumn 2023 | The Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) Visioning Workshop, which took place virtually on August 15-17 of 2023, convened discussions focused on the current status and future direction of the CCPP. The workshop was organized by a multi-institutional committee composed of representatives from DTC (Grant Firl, Lulin Xue, Dustin Swales, Ligia Bernardet), NCAR’s Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology (Laura Fowler) and Climate and Global Dynamics (Courtney Peverley) Laboratories,… Read More

Did you know?: Events and Opportunities

Autumn 2023 | Upcoming Events Attending AGU or AMS and interested in learning more about what the DTC staff are up to?  Check out these presentations! 2023 AGU Annual Meeting Dec 13 Impact of ensemble design on the development of the… Read More

PROUD Award - Excellence in Action: GRANT FIRL, Research Scientist II, CSU/CIRA at NOAA GSL & DTC

Performance Recognition for OUtstanding DTC achievements (PROUD) Award

2023-11-28 | Grant Firl is a Research Scientist II (more specifically, an Atmospheric Physics Development and Implementation Research Scientist) with the CSU/CIRA at NOAA GSL, contributing to the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) project at the DTC. Grant was the foundational developer of the CCPP Single-Column Model (SCM). He wrote and documented the entire SCM from scratch, which required the scientific understanding of how an SCM works and the technical skill to code in both Fortran and Python. He then connected several… Read More

Lead Story: A long-term vision of Hierarchical System Development for UFS

Summer 2023 | Despite significant improvement of model development and computational resources, model forecast issues still exist in numerical weather prediction (NWP) and Earth system models (ESMs), including the Unified Forecast System (UFS). Hierarchical System Development (HSD) (Ek et al. 2019 Read More

Director's Corner: Israel Jirak

Summer 2023 | DTC plays an important role in model development and evaluation for NOAA and the broader Unified Forecast System (UFS) community.  My first interaction with DTC was back in 2010 in the Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT), when the Method for Object-Based Diagnostic Evaluation (MODE) was being tested for convective applications.  MODE is part of DTC’s Model Evaluation Tools (MET) and serves as an innovative alternative to traditional grid-based metrics for model evaluation.  MODE offers a… Read More

Who's Who: Weiwei Li

Summer 2023 | Weiwei Li joined the Research Applications Laboratory at NCAR in 2018. She leads and contributes to multiple projects focused on assessing model physics performance to inform their improvements in a modeling/forecasting system. She is currently working on testing and evaluation of the physical parameterizations, involving two major modeling systems, i.e., the Unified Forecast System (UFS) and the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS). Her team uses partially idealized simulations… Read More

Bridges to Operations: Informing and Optimizing Ensemble Design in the RRFS

Summer 2023 | Implementing a single-dycore and single-physics RRFS will allow a number of deterministic modeling systems to be retired.

Visitors: Developing a METplus use case for the Grid-Diag tool

Visitor: Marion Mittermaier

Summer 2023 | Marion Mittermaier’s visitor project focused on developing a METplus use case for the Grid-Diag tool, which creates histograms for an arbitrary collection of data fields and levels. Marion used the Grid-Diag tool to investigate the relationship between the forecasted and observed precipitation accumulations for GloSea5, the UK Met Office ensemble seasonal prediction system and how the relationship evolved over time. The project is a sub-task of a larger body of work that uses… Read More

Community Connections: METplus Training Expanded

Summer 2023 | The METplus team launched part one of the METplus Advanced Training Series this past spring, which focused on Prototypes in the Cloud, Subseasonal to Seasonal (S2S) Diagnostics, and Coupled Model Components.  The intent of the METplus Advanced Training Series was to extend beyond… Read More

Did you know?: Internship Opportunity

Summer 2023 | The Lapenta internship invites undergraduate (sophomore and junior) as well as graduate students from all STEM disciplines (marine science, atmospheric science, engineering, social science, applied math, etc) to participate in 10-week (early June to mid August) projects that span all five line offices and the Office of Marine and Aviation Operations. These projects are high-impact, short-term research-to-operations (R2O) efforts where students learn coding and networking side-by-side… Read More

Software Release: METplus v5.1 Coordinated Release

2023-08-01 | The DTC is pleased to announce the release of the multi-component verification framework called the enhanced Model Evaluation Tools (METplus), or METplus. METplus contains a suite of Python wrappers and ancillary scripts to enhance the user's ability to quickly set-up and run MET. METplus also has an analysis suite including METviewer and METexpress user interfaces and METdataio, METcalcpy, and METplotpy as shared packages for loading and storing MET output as well as aggregating and… Read More

PROUD Award - Excellence in Action: Kate Fossell, Associate Scientist IV, NCAR/MMM and DTC

Performance Recognition for OUtstanding DTC achievements (PROUD) Award

2023-08-21 | Kate Fossell is an Associate Scientist IV in MMM at NCAR, contributing to two DTC projects; the Unified Post Processor (UPP) and the Numerical Weather Prediction cloud container projects. Kate has worked with the DTC for 10 years with much of her time dedicated to co-leading the UPP project and its growing team through its transition to the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) in 2023. During this period, she built a strong collaborative relationship with the UPP team at the NOAA Environmental Modeling Center (EMC),… Read More