Did you know?: METplus Advanced Training Series Focuses on High Impact Events and Subseasonal to Seasonal Prediction

Spring 2023 | The METplus team offered three sessions of an advanced training series during Spring 2023 and plans to add three to four new sessions during Fall 2023. The intent was to extend beyond the Basic Training Series provided during the winter and spring of 2021/2022. The recorded Basic series and report about the sessions can be found at METplus Training Series Read More

Lead Story: Using the CCPP SCM as a Teaching Tool

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

Director's Corner: Hui-Ya Chuang

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

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?

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