2024-01-24 | The DTC is in the process of developing plans for a major overhaul of its website.  As a part of this process, the DTC will be removing the webpages for the following software systems that the DTC no longer supports at the beginning of April 2024: Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) Vortex Tracker for Tropical Cyclones Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) Hurricane WRF (HWRF) Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) containers Unified Post Processing System (UPP) If any of the… Read More

Autumn 2023 | During the first few years of the DTC, the United States Air Force (USAF) put forth a vision for the DTC to develop a suite for verification tools that would provide reproducible results such that statistics and metrics could be shared across institutions.  The USAF envisioned a suite of tools that would include both standard verification approaches, as well as advanced diagnostic methodologies.  In 2008, the DTC released the software package, Model Evaluation Tools (MET) to… Read More

Autumn 2023 | Cristiana Stan of George Mason University originally proposed a very exciting and new type of DTC visitor project that involved holding a “hack-a-thon” where teams of two graduate students would be tasked with selecting and developing a METplus Use Case for one of the subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) metrics identified during the 2021 DTC UFS Evaluation Metrics Workshop.  The winning team would then be given the opportunity to visit the DTC for up to three months to collaborate with… Read More

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

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

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

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

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… Read More

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