Director's Corner: Reflections on community-wide physics development for operations

Lisa Bengtsson

Spring 2021 |   My involvement in model physics development and coordination for operational use, in both Europe and the U.S., has afforded me an interesting and rewarding perspective on the unique philosophies and approaches taken along the path of research to operations on both sides of the Atlantic. In many ways, the challenges faced by large organizations or collaborative consortiums when developing/selecting physics for operations are very similar for Europe and the U.S. For instance, when… Read More

Visitors: Boreal Scientific Computing Mobile Headquarters

Visitor: Don Morton

Spring 2021 |   My projects with the DTC Visitor Program have been high points in my 30+ year career as a computational scientist interested in atmospheric sciences.  In 1986 as a Staff Sergeant in the United States Air Force, I discovered my deep interest and aptitude in computer science, and uncovered a new fascination with science, especially the geophysical kind. It inspired me to chart a course towards finally finishing my BS degree and explore graduate school with the notion of applying… Read More

Announcement: DTC Workshop on Integrating Cloud and Container Technologies into University Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) Curriculum

2021-03-25 | Are you a professor teaching a Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) class or who has been wanting to integrate aspects of NWP into your curriculum? Have you wanted to give your students hands-on, practical NWP experience but never had the resources? This workshop is for you! The DTC will be hosting a virtual… Read More

Software Release: CCPP and SCM v5.0.0

2021-03-08 | The Developmental Testbed Center is pleased to announce the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) v5.0.0 public release on March 08, 2021. This release contains the CCPP-Physics, a library of physical parameterizations, the CCPP-Framework, an infrastructure  that connects the physics to host models, and the CCPP Single Column Model, a simple host model that employs the CCPP-Physics and CCPP-Framework. Additional information and access to the code can be found here. The CCPP-Physics is envisioned to contain… Read More

Software Release: UFS SRW App v1.0.0 release

2021-03-04 | The UFS Short-Range Weather (SRW) Application v1.0.0 was publicly released on 3/4/2021. A news article is available at https://www.weather.gov/news/210403-ufs and a full release description can be found at https://ufscommunity.org/news/srwa.  This is the first major release of the application that targets predictions of atmospheric behavior on a limited spatial domain and on time scales from less than an hour out to several days. The UFS SRW App is the foundation for building NOAA’s future convection-allowing ensemble… Read More

Software Release: Announcing UPP V9.0.0 Release

2021-03-04 | Dear UPP Community,   The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is pleased to announce the release of the Unified Post Processor Version 9.0.0. This release marks another major change in the UPP code base, by adding support for the newly released Short-Range Weather Application (the limited-area application of the Unified Forecast System) and discontinuing support for WRF and GRIB1 data. Read More

Lead Story: 2020 HFIP Annual Meeting Highlights

Winter 2021 | The three-day HFIP Annual Meeting 2020 was held virtually on November 17-19, 2020. Approximately 130 participants from NOAA line offices, DTC, NCAR, and university partners participated in the meeting. NOAA/NWS/OSTI Modeling Program Division Director Dr. Dorothy Koch kicked off the meeting with welcoming remarks. Day one focused on HFIP programmatic updates, a discussion of forecasters' needs and current activities supporting operations and a summary of the results from the forecasters' HFIP display survey.  Day two… Read More

Director's Corner: The Age of EPIC: What does this mean for DTC?

Gretchen Mullendore

Winter 2021 | In 2017, Congress instructed NOAA to establish the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) to advance “observational, computing, and modeling capabilities to support substantial improvement in weather forecasting and prediction of high impact weather events.”  What will the details of EPIC look like?  EPIC has not yet been formed, so the community doesn’t know, and it’s not yet clear that NOAA knows either.  Hopefully, it can achieve its goal to improve accessibility to the operational code and data so that scientists… Read More

Who's Who: Tatiana Burek

Winter 2021 | Many of you may know Tatiana Burek as the developer and gatekeeper of METviewer, the visualization software for the verification package developed and supported by the DTC, but her life took a series of turns to arrive at the DTC. She grew up in Leningrad, Russia where she spent her childhood as a passionate competitor, both as a speed skater and swimmer, all while attending rigorous dance classes. Undaunted by year-round swim team practice sessions in the outdoor pool, whose coach… Read More

Bridges to Operations: Upcoming UFS Metrics Workshop

Winter 2021 | The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC), in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Unified Forecast System's Verification and Validation Cross-Cutting Team (UFS-V&V), is hosting a three-day workshop to identify key verification and validation metrics for UFS applications.  The workshop will be held remotely 22-24 February, 2021. Approximately 275 participants have registered for this event from across the research and operational… Read More

Visitors: DTC Visitor Program Xuguang Wang

VIsitor: Xuguang Wang

Winter 2021 | Dr. Xuguang Wang is a Robert Lowry Chair Professor and Presidential Research Professor of School of Meteorology of University of Oklahoma. She leads a Multiscale data Assimilation and Predictability (MAP) lab. Her MAP research includes (a) developing new techniques and novel methodologies for data assimilation and ensemble prediction; (b) applying these techniques for global, hurricane, and convective-scale numerical prediction systems that assimilate a variety of Read More

Community Connections: Building a Community through UFS Medium-Range Weather Application Users’ Training

Winter 2021 | The DTC, in cooperation with subject-matter experts from NOAA's Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), as well as NCAR’s Climate and Global Dynamics (CGD) Laboratory hosted a live, virtual training session for the Unified Forecast System (UFS) Medium-Range Weather (MRW) Application 4-6 November and… Read More

Did you know?: Data on the Cloud

Winter 2021 | NOAA’s Big Data Program (BDP) is providing public access to NOAA's open data on commercial cloud platforms through public-private partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. NOAA generates tens of terabytes of data a day from observations like satellites, radars, and buoys, and from weather models, and other sources. Did you know the available datasets include: UFS Coupled Model Prototype 5 (S2SP5), which is the latest experimental version of the UFS coupled atmosphere-ocean-sea ice… Read More

Software Release: METEXPRESS V3.0.1 RELEASE

2020-12-10 | The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is pleased to announce the release of the METexpress application, Version 3.0.1 (dated Oct. 7, 2020).  METexpress is a simplified data analysis visualization component of the enhanced Model Evaluation Tools (METplus) verification system.     Download & Installation To download this version of METexpress… Read More

Software Release: UFS MRW App v1.1.0 release

2020-10-06 | The UFS Medium-Range Application v1.1.0 was publicly released on 10/06/2020. This is a minor release of the system that predicts atmospheric behavior out to about two weeks. New capabilities in this release include the ability to ingest GFS raw initial conditions in netCDF format (to be introduced with GFSv16), flexibility to customize the post processor output, and safeguards against occasional extreme sea surface temperatures present in the initial conditions. This release is compatible with Python 3 and with recent… Read More