Daily forecasts from the NCAR Ensemble will stop on December 31, 2017

To our users and supporters:

Thank you for your enthusiastic support of the NCAR Ensemble project over the past 2.5 years. With some sadness, we are announcing that production of daily forecasts will end on December 31, 2017.

Initially, we only planned to produce these forecasts for one year as a demonstration of how a future operational convection-allowing ensemble could be configured. Given the strong community enthusiasm for our forecasts, we lobbied to extend the project. However, as NCAR is a research institution, these forecasts were never intended to continue indefinitely, and we hope the now-operational HREFv2 can fill the void left by the discontinuation of our daily products.

By ending these forecasts, we will free-up resources to work toward even better high-resolution ensemble prediction systems. In fact, we are actively collaborating with NOAA/GSD on development of the "HRRR-Ensemble (HRRRE)", envisioned as NOAA's first formal convective-scale ensemble that is anticipated to begin operations in 2022. Additionally, over the next few years, we will periodically produce real-time forecasts in support of various NOAA testbeds. During these demonstration periods, the forecast and analysis configurations will likely change substantially compared to what we have been running, and these forecasts will again be posted to the internet, but possibly not at this site. If you would like to be notified when we operate during testbeds, please send us an email.

Our entire data archive will remain publicly available, and we encourage you to download the data and perform research, either independently, or in collaboration with us. An archive of graphics from historical forecasts will also continue to be available at http://ensemble.ucar.edu.

We would appreciate it if you would provide us with some information about how you used the NCAR Ensemble by completing this quick voluntary survey.

Thank you again for your support, and we are very happy to have been able to provide this community resource over the past few years.

The NCAR Ensemble Team