Who's Who: Mike Kavulich

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

Bridges to Operations: Informing NCEP Legacy Operational Model Retirement Through Scorecards

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

Visitors: How do TC-specific Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) physics impact forecasts across scales and UFS applications?

Visitor: Andrew Hazelton

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

Community Connections: JEDI projects adopts and contributes to CCPP variable naming standard

Winter 2023 | In September of 2022, the JCSDA (Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation) officially adopted the CCPP standard names, originally developed for use with the Common Community Physics Package, as the model variable names to be used within the JEDI (Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration) software. The JEDI software is employed by many Earth observing systems and requires agreed-upon names to be used for the quantities being input and computed. It is critical that these names are understood identically between… Read More

Did you know?: DTC will be involved in a number of upcoming events

Winter 2023 | Did you know?

PROUD Award - Excellence in Action: Gerard Ketefian, Research Scientist III CU/CIRES and NOAA GSL

Performance Recognition for OUtstanding DTC achievements (PROUD) Award

2023-02-23 | Gerard Ketefian works for CU/CIRES at NOAA GSL and contributes to four DTC projects: Unified Forecast System (UFS) Short-Range Weather Application (SRW) software support & community engagement, DTC activities in support of community involvement with the UFS, Agile Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) prototype Testing and Evaluation (T&E), and Optimizing Ensemble Design for Use in the RRFS. Gerard has taken the lead in the submission of a massive METplus-related contribution to the UFS SRW Application repository… Read More

Software Release: METplus v5.0 Coordinated Release

2022-12-09 | The DTC is pleased to announce the release of the multi-component verification framework called the enhanced Model Evaluation Tools (MET), or METplus (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5567804). METplus contains a suite of Python… Read More

Lead Story: SIMA: Constructing a Single Atmospheric Modeling System for Addressing Frontier Science Topics

Autumn 2022 | The System for Integrated Modeling of the Atmosphere (SIMA) project aims to unify existing NCAR community atmosphere modeling efforts across weather, climate, chemistry, and geospace research. NCAR scientists, in partnership with the atmospheric and geospace sciences research community, are developing a SIMA framework and infrastructure that enables simulations of atmospheric processes and atmospheric interactions with other components of the coupled Earth system ranging from the… Read More

Director's Corner: DTC Contributions to Other NOAA testbeds and the US Air Force Weather Enterprise

Christopher Melick

Autumn 2022 | The DTC was established in 2003 as a multi-agency effort with funding from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US Air Force, and the National Center For Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and has made its mark as the “clearing-house” for testing and evaluation (T&E) activities within the meteorological and associated Earth science community. As such, it provides a fundamental bridge between research and operations where cutting-edge ideas can be explored and vetted… Read More

Who's Who: Molly Smith

Autumn 2022 | Molly Smith is one of DTC’s NOAA collaborators on our staff, and recently became one of the leads for METplus. Her background is in tropical meteorology, and she is the primary developer for the METexpress visualization system. Molly grew up in the chaparral on the edge of the Mojave Desert in Southern California. It does not rain very often in that part of the country, but when Molly was five, a strong El… Read More

Bridges to Operations: Single-Precision Physics in CCPP

Autumn 2022 | A constant struggle in NWP model design is the tradeoff between scientific improvements and computational cost. A method commonly used to balance that tradeoff is lowering some numerical calculations to single precision (or 32-bit calculations). Often, single-precision calculations have enough precision for physics, and they reduce disk storage, memory usage, and computation time. To apply single-precision calculations correctly, it is necessary to carefully evaluate and fine-tune… Read More

Community Connections: Continuous integration for community engagement in CCPP Physics code management

Autumn 2022 | Continuous integration (CI) is a software development practice where developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository whereby automated builds and tests are run. The key goals of continuous integration are to quickly find and address bugs, improve software quality, and reduce the time it takes to validate and release new software updates. The DTC Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) team has not only adopted CI for CCPP Physics code updates and releases, but… Read More

Did you know?: Registration is open for the 2023 Lapenta Internship

Autumn 2022 | NOAA is offering paid summer internships, named the 2023 Lapenta Internship, targeted towards current 2nd and 3rd-year undergraduate and enrolled graduate students to work in areas that will provide robust research and/or operational experience to prepare them for further study in NOAA fields, for application to fellowships, or for the NOAA-mission workforce. Projects may be focused on research areas or the… Read More

Did you know?: New UCAR and WPO fellowships for PhDs

Autumn 2022 | UCAR’s Cooperative Programs for the Advancement of Earth System Science (CPAESS) is excited to announce the launch of a new fellowship with NOAA's Weather Program Office (WPO): the WPO Innovation for Next Generation Scientists (WINGS) Dissertation Fellowship. The WINGS Fellowship is designed for Ph.D.… Read More

PROUD Award - Excellence in Action: Man Zhang, Research Scientist II CU/CIRES and NOAA GSL

Performance Recognition for OUtstanding DTC achievements (PROUD) Award

2022-11-14 | Man Zhang works for CU/CIRES at NOAA GSL and contributes to three DTC projects: Testing and Evaluation of Unified Forecast System (UFS) Physics for Operations, Toward a Unified Physics Package for the UFS Applications, and CCPP Software Support & Community Engagement. Man has gone above and beyond the call of duty to mentor a student during the Summer of 2022. It all started when she wrote about an idea for a short project, which caught the eye of CU Denver undergraduate student Jessica Paredes Saltijeral, a… Read More