Autumn 2017 | The DTC is pleased to announce that registration is now open for the 2018 Hurricane WRF (HWRF) tutorial to be held 23–25 January 2018 at the NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction (NCWCP) in College Park, MD. Registration, a draft agenda, and information about hotel accommodations and other logistics can be found on our tutorial website: 2018 HWRF tutorial The HWRF tutorial will be a three-day event organized by the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) and by the NOAA Environmental Modeling Center (EMC).… Read More

Autumn 2017 | The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is pleased to announce the release of the following community data assimilation systems: Version 3.6 of the Community Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) data assimilation system Version 1.2 of the Community Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) data assimilation system The released packages for GSI and EnKF and the documentation for each can be accessed through each system website as follows… Read More

Summer 2017 | The MET development team at the DTC is pleased to announce the release of the MET version 6.0 verification package. It is available for download from the MET Users web page. The MET development team significantly enhanced the run-time performance of a number of tools, enhanced the data and file format capabilities, and added new capabilities for point observations, gridded analyses and tropical cyclone and probabilistic verification. Full details about the changes for this new version… Read More

Summer 2017 | “The most common feedback from the workshop participants noted the increase in transparency within the EMC and NOAA at large, the increasing effort to engage the entire community, and the general sense of positive momentum of the community coming together to embrace the opportunity to use NGGPS as a foundation to build a true community modeling resource for the Nation.”

Summer 2017 | The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) was established in 2003 with a mission to facilitate research to operation transitions in regional Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP). The DTC fulfills this mission by (i) providing community support for regional operational systems, (ii) performing testing and evaluation of NWP innovations for possible operational implementation, and (iii) promoting interaction and collaboration between research and operational NWP communities through special workshops, visitor programs, and the… Read More

Summer 2017 | I grew up in Mound, MN, which is a western suburb of the Twin Cities. While most would consider Minnesota a cold and snowy state, I apparently wanted colder and snowier weather because I decided to head further north to Grand Forks, ND to attend the University of North Dakota (UND). I am an avid UND hockey fan and love heading to the games when they come out to play University of Denver or Colorado College in Colorado. Experiencing bitterly cold temperatures walking to class at UND certainly made me appreciate the amazing… Read More

Summer 2017 | Post-processing is an essential but often overlooked component of numerical weather prediction and encompasses a broad range of concepts, methods, and tools to make raw model output more useful. The Unified Post Processor (UPP) can compute a variety of diagnostic fields, interpolate to pressure levels or specified (pre-defined or custom) grids, and de-stagger grids. Examples of the products include: T, Z, humidity, wind, cloud water, cloud ice, rain, and snow on isobaric levels SLP, shelter… Read More

Summer 2017 | As a visitor to DTC in 2016, University of North Dakota Ph.D. candidate Mariusz Starzec investigated the performance of regional summertime convective forecasts. In particular, he focused on model skill in predicting the coverage, morphology, and intensity of convection. Further emphasis was placed on how representative the simulated internal convective structure is of observed convection by using the reflectivity field as proxy for convective processes. Convection plays a major role in everyday weather and long term climate… Read More

Summer 2017 | On 8-9 November 2016, more than 80 scientists from a broad cross-section of the physics development community gathered for the Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS) Atmospheric Physics Workshop at the NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction. The workshop provided an opportunity for the NGGPS Physics Team to revisit and refine its near- and long-term priorities for advancing the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) global physics suite and identify key areas that need attention.… Read More

Winter 2017 | “These metrics can provide very succinct information about many aspects of forecast performance without having to resort to complicated, computationally expensive techniques. ”

Winter 2017 | As the new Director of the Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), I have the pleasure of leading nearly two hundred world-class scientists, engineers and other staff in developing, transitioning, improving and maintaining a suite of global and regional environmental models to support the National Weather Service (NWS) mission of the protecting life and property for our country.  To meet the challenges of this mission, EMC has formed strategic partnerships with numerous community organizations over the years to collaboratively… Read More

Winter 2017 | As a visiting scientist at the University of Maryland in 2005, Man Zhang learned of Colorado’s reputation of being a great place to live. When her husband had an opportunity to come to Colorado as a visiting Ph.D. student, they didn’t think twice about moving. They love Colorado and have been in the Boulder area for almost 10 years. Man was a post-doc at CIRA in the ensemble data assimilation group. She applied the hybrid variational-ensemble data assimilation system (HVEDAS) developed at CIRA to the NOAA operational… Read More

Winter 2017 | The community Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF) modeling system was upgraded to version 3.8a on November 21, 2016.  This release includes all components of the HWRF system: scripts, data preprocessing, vortex initialization, data assimilation, atmospheric and ocean models, coupler, postprocessor, and vortex tracker.  In addition to default operational features, the release includes capabilities to perform idealized tropical cyclone simulations run with alternate physics, and backwards compatibility for inner… Read More

Winter 2017 | As visitors to the DTC in 2016, Michael Iacono and John Henderson of Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) used the Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting model (HWRF) to investigate an improved way of representing the vertical overlap of partial cloudiness and showed that this process strongly influences the transfer of radiation in the atmosphere and can impact the evolution of simulated tropical cyclones. Clouds are a critical element of Earth’s climate because they strongly affect both the incoming solar (or… Read More

Winter 2017 | The DTC hosted its annual DTC Science Advisory Board (SAB) meeting on September 14-15, 2016.  This annual event provides an opportunity for the DTC to present a review of DTC key accomplishments over the past three years to representatives of the research community and to collect input directed at shaping a strategy for the future.  “The DTC enables and supports a wide variety of research-to-operations and operations-to-… Read More