Winter 2023 | The climate graduate programs at George Mason University offer an Earth System Modeling course. The course is divided into two subtopics, theory and practicum. The theoretical session offers lectures introducing students to the physical and dynamical components of an Earth system model, their interactions, and how these components are used to predict the behavior of weather and climate. When I became the instructor of the Earth System Modeling course, I added a module to the practicum session that provides students the… Read More

Winter 2023 | I was excited when the DTC nominated me to serve on the DTC Science Advisory Board in 2020 and then felt very honored to be asked to become a co-chair in 2022. As one of the first group of EMC staff to be sent to work with DTC on bridging the gap between research and operations, I have watched DTC grow into an organization that accomplished its mission to bridge the gaps, by not only providing community support for several operational softwares, but also facilitating collaboration by developing Common Community Physics… Read More

Winter 2023 | Mike Kavulich grew up in suburban Connecticut, the oldest of three children with a younger brother and sister. From his earliest memories he had an obsession with the weather, giving weather reports to his class in preschool, watching and re-watching weather documentaries recorded from TV on VHS, and tracking hurricanes on a copied paper hurricane tracking map taped to the wooden basement door. Because he did not have cable or internet, he would call his grandmother every day of the late summer to turn on the Weather… Read More

Winter 2023 | NOAA is undergoing a massive, community-driven initiative to unify the NCEP operational model suite under the Unified Forecast System (UFS) umbrella. A key component of this effort is transitioning from the legacy systems to unified Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere (FV3)-based deterministic and ensemble operational global and regional systems. For the UFS, the goal is to consolidate operational models around a common software framework, reduce the complexity of the NCEP operational suite, and maximize available HPC resources,… Read More

Winter 2023 | One of the most important aspects of numerical modeling is the series of approximations made to represent certain physical processes, known as “parameterizations.” These approximations of critical atmospheric phenomena can make a huge impact on the solutions that a model provides, so making these parameterizations more accurate across a variety of applications is a major goal of numerical weather prediction (NWP). … Read More