Summer 2013 | Robert Fovell and Travis Wilson from the University of California/Los Angeles recently completed a visitor project titled “Improvements to modeling persistent surface cold pools in WRF”, aspects of which will be part of Travis’ PhD work. Travis spent nine months working at the DTC in Boulder, much of the time with his DTC host Jamie Wolff, and Rob visited for two weeks in March and June. A principal motivation for their study was the occasionally poor prediction in numerical models (including in WRF) of the… Read More

Summer 2013 | The Weather Prediction Center (WPC) at NCEP has been using MODE to supplement its traditional verification techniques since April 2010. The Method for Object-based Diagnostic Evaluation (MODE), a utility that is part of the MET verification package, has been developed with substantial support from the DTC. Both are systematically expanded and maintained for specific DTC tasks and an array of outside users. MODE output is available to WPC forecasters in real time through an internal website that displays… Read More

Summer 2013 | Through its Visitor Program, the DTC is currently working with Adam Clark, a scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS), on a project that involves using the Method for Object-based Diagnostic Evaluation – Time Domain (MODE-TD) for identification, tracking, and visualization of simulated supercells in high-resolution models, which will be applied and tested during annual NOAA/Hazardous Weather Testbed Spring Forecasting Experiments.

Spring 2013 | The DTC provides a common framework for researchers to demonstrate the merits of new developments through the Mesoscale Model Evaluation Testbed (MMET). Established in the Fall of 2012, MMET provides initialization and observation data sets for several case studies and week-long extended periods that can be used by the entire numerical weather prediction (NWP) community for testing and evaluation. The MMET data sets also include baseline results generated by the DTC… Read More

Spring 2013 | Welcome to the first issue of a quarterly newsletter for the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC). The research to operations (R2O) transition in numerical weather prediction (NWP) is a major challenge facing the U.S. meteorological community. It has been recognized that the U.S. has the largest community around the world working on weather research and numerical modeling. Yet, most of these research results do not directly benefit operational NWP. The DTC was established in 2003 with a mission to facilitate… Read More

Spring 2013 | If you’ve submitted a question to the MET help desk, or attended a MET tutorial, there’s a very good chance that you already know John Halley Gotway. John joined NCAR’s Research Applications Laboratory (RAL) as a software developer in 2004 and has been contributing to the verification efforts within RAL and the DTC. John’s background is in mathematics. He worked in Los Angeles at Northrop Grumman, before NCAR and the Rockies drew him to Colorado. His expertise is in… Read More

Spring 2013 | One of the regional numerical weather prediction models used operationally by the National Weather Service is the Hurricane WRF (HWRF), a coupled model with atmospheric and ocean components that exchange fluxes of short- and long-wave radiation, momentum, moisture, and heat. The momentum flux is particularly important because the strong winds in tropical cyclones cause turbulence and upwelling in the ocean, which can lead to transport of cold water from deep in the ocean towards the surface, reducing the… Read More

Spring 2013 | For several winter seasons, the DTC has worked with the Hydrometeorology Testbed (HMT) to develop effective verification techniques for ensemble forecasts of heavy winter precipitation associated with atmospheric rivers in California. For example, the performance diagram below displays the impact of model resolution. See additional HMT information and links on the DTC website. See http://www.dtcenter. org/eval/hmt/2012/.

Autumn 2013 | As operational centers move inexorably toward ensemble-based probabilistic forecasting, the role of the DTC as a bridge between research and operations has expanded to include testing and evaluation of ensemble forecasting systems. In 2010 the ensemble task area in the DTC was designed with the ultimate goal of providing an environment in which extensive testing and evaluation of ensemble-related techniques developed by the NWP community could be conducted. Because these results should be immediately relevant to… Read More

Autumn 2013 | The Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA) has long been a partner with the DTC since its “unofficial” early days of “core testing” (remember those), to its official charter membership signing in September of 2009, to date. Air Force Weather (AFW) recognized early, the essential role this organization could, and would, play in bolstering and mitigating an ever-growing US Air Force resource constrained terrestrial weather RDT&E environment. Further partnering with our NOAA National Centers for Environmental… Read More

Autumn 2013 | In many ways, Hui is the quintessential DTC lead. Stationed at NCEP’s Environmental Modeling Center but spending several weeks a year in Boulder, she lives R2O (data assimilation variety) day in and day out. Besides the frequent commutes, she is a long-distance veteran in another way, with undergraduate and masters’ level education in China, a PhD at Florida State, and now her dual appointment of sorts in DC and Boulder. There was some chance at Nanjing University that she would follow a different career: space science was… Read More

Autumn 2013 | Unlike some other forecast model components, a data assimilation (DA) system is usually built to be flexible in order to be run by different forecast systems at varying scales. Its testing and evaluation must therefore be performed in the context of a specific application; in other words, it must be adaptable to different operational requirements as well as to research advances. Established in 2009, the DTC DA team started providing data assimilation support and testing and evaluation… Read More

Autumn 2013 | Given its mission to facilitate the research to operations transition in numerical weather prediction, the DTC has a mandate to stay connected with both the research and operational NWP communities. As a means to that end, the DTC Science Advisory Board (SAB) was established to provide (i) advice on strategic directions, (ii) recommendations for new code or new NWP innovations for testing and evaluation, and (iii) reviews of DTC Visitor Program proposals… Read More

Autumn 2013 | The Tropical Cyclone Modeling Team (TCMT) was formed as part RAL’s Joint Numerical Testbed (JNT) in 2009 to help assess hurricane and tropical storm forecasts from experimental models. As such, its members interact with the DTC in two particular ways: by designing methods and products appropriate for tropical cyclone verification that can be installed in maintained software at the DTC, and by providing both real-time and retrospective performance measures for each years’ hurricane forecasts. At a working level,… Read More