2020-01-10 | The first Unified Forecast System (UFS) Users’ Workshop will take place on July 27-29, 2020 at NCAR's Center Green Campus in Boulder, Colorado, with the aim to establish an annual forum to exchange ideas, advance education on applying the UFS, and embrace the full potential of the community to support and help improve the UFS modeling and prediction system. It will feature lively engagement and discussions with diverse groups of participants from across the Weather Enterprise including public… Read More

Autumn 2019 | The Earth Prediction Innovation Center, or “EPIC,” will advance Earth system modeling skills, reclaim and maintain international leadership in Earth system prediction, and improve the transition of research to operations (R2O) and operations to research (O2R) within NOAA by working closely with partners across the weather enterprise.  EPIC’s legislative language is included as an amendment to the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act (WRFIA) of 2017 (Public Law 115-25… Read More

Autumn 2019 | What does unified modeling mean to you? Perhaps an obvious meaning is that “unified” implies one single model: one choice for dynamics, physics, data assimilation, and postprocessing. Everyone uses the same code: universities, private companies, research labs, and operational prediction centers. It is a grand vision. As a community, we are not there yet. I argue that there is a more practical, and potentially more useful definition of unified modeling: codes are easily shared and interoperable. Why do I say this? At… Read More

Autumn 2019 | Tell us a little about yourself and your career path. I’m a Wisconsin native and grew up fascinated by severe storms. Naturally, when it came time to think about college, I looked for meteorology programs in the midwest. I settled on Saint Louis University for my B.S. in Atmospheric Sciences and then earned my M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee (UWM).  After graduation, I stayed on at UWM as a researcher while also working for a UWM-affiliated meteorological consulting company called… Read More

Autumn 2019 | Ensembles are useful forecast tools because they account for uncertainties in initial conditions, lateral boundary conditions, and/or model physics, and they provide probabilistic information to users. However, many ensembles suffer from under-dispersion, sub-optimal reliability, and systematic biases. Machine learning (ML) can help remedy these shortcomings by post-processing raw ensemble output. Conceptually, ML identifies (nonlinear and linear) patterns in… Read More

Autumn 2019 | One of the primary goals of the DTC is to provide software and infrastructure that aid in transitions between the research and operational communities.  The American Meteorology Society (AMS) provides an ideal venue for sharing these tools with the community through the AMS short course offerings at the Annual Meeting.  The DTC is looking forward to presenting two short courses at the 100th AMS Annual Meeting in Boston, MA in January 2020.  “Integrating Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) System Components… Read More

Autumn 2019 |   The Model Evaluation Tools (MET) were developed and released to the community by the Developmental Testbed Center more than a decade ago.  At that time, the tools included computation of traditional statistics for continuous fields (temperature, pressure, and height) and dichotomous fields (precipitation, clouds, fog, and high impact events). MET also included a spatial verification method, using objects, which complemented traditional statistics.   Over the past five years, new flexibility and… Read More

2019-10-10 | The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) will host a short course on Integrating NWP System Components Using Container Technology and Cloud Services on 12 January 2020 preceding the 100th AMS Annual Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts. The goal of this course is to raise awareness about tools and facilities available to the community for testing and evaluating Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) innovations, including the emerging set of software tools in reusable containers and cloud computing resources, through hands-on… Read More

2019-10-11 | The AMS Short Course on Experimentation and Development of Physical Parameterizations for Numerical Weather Prediction Using a single-column model and the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP)  will be held on 12 January 2020 preceding the 100th AMS Annual Meeting in Boston, MA. Preliminary programs, registration, hotel, and general information will be posted on the AMS Web site.     The goal of this course is to familiarize participants with new tools for experimentation and development of physical… Read More

Spring 2019 | With funding from the Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS) initiative and broad support from the community, the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)/Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) recently replaced the dynamic core in its flagship operational model, the Global Forecast System (GFS). Version 15 of the GFS (GFSv15), implemented in operations on June 12, 2019, includes the Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere (FV3) non-hydrostatic dynamical core in place of the long-running spectral hydrostatic core… Read More

Spring 2019 | NCAR and NOAA are each adopting a unified approach to coupled environmental modeling, where success for both efforts is critically dependent on community contributions.  At the end of January 2019, NCAR and NOAA signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) to develop a shared infrastructure that encourages the broader community to engage in improving the Nation’s weather and climate modeling capabilities. Collaborating on the development of a common infrastructure will reduce duplication of effort and create common community… Read More

Spring 2019 | We stand at the dawn of the operational FV3 era, representing the first step in the implementation of NOAA's Next-Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS). With this new era comes many challenges, but also many opportunities to work collaboratively to improve the operational modeling system. How can NOAA best work with the community to leverage these opportunities and develop a truly world-class weather and climate prediction system? A few ideas: Develop a decadal vision for world-class numerical weather prediction.… Read More

Spring 2019 | Gerard Ketefian tries to “get big computers to tell him if it’s going to be sunny or rainy or snowy tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, and…” that’s how he explains his job to a child - and he has two -- a 2-year old boy and 4-year old girl. Gerard’s background is engineering. He has a B.S. in civil and mechanical engineering and M.S. in environmental engineering with emphasis on environmental fluid mechanics (both air and water). Gerard’s Ph.D. involved computational fluid dynamics applied to atmospheric… Read More

Spring 2019 | Jacob Radford, a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University and visitor to the DTC during June of 2018, investigated the forecast skill of the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) model for banded snowfall events. In particular, he evaluated the HRRR’s ability to capture the location, areal extent, orientation, and aspect ratio of these locally enhanced regions of reflectivity. In theory, snowbands should be adequately resolved by the HRRR thanks to its fine grid-spacing, but model skill has not yet been assessed… Read More

Spring 2019 | The Model Evaluation for Research Innovation Transition (MERIT) project provides a critical framework for physics developers to test innovations within their schemes using selected meteorological cases that have been analyzed in depth.  Comparing their results to baseline MERIT simulations will allow developers to determine whether their innovations address model shortcomings and improve operational numerical weather prediction. For the DTC’s AOP 2018, three high-impact global FV3 baseline cases were selected for in-… Read More