Weygandt, Steve, National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration/ESRL, Ming Hu, NOAA/ESRL and CIRES, Tanya Smirnova, NOAA/ESRL
and CIRES, Stan Benjamin, NOAA/ESRL, John M. Brown, NOAA/ESRL, Haidao Lin, NOAA/ESRL
and CIRA, Georg Grell, NOAA/ESRL, Eric James, NOAA/ESRL, Patrick Hofmann, NOAA/ESRL
and CIRES, David Dowell, NOAA/ESRL, Brian Jamison, NOAA/ESRL and CIRA, Susan
Sahm, NOAA/ESRL
The Rapid Refresh (RAP)
mesoscale analysis and prediction system is expected to replace the Rapid
Update Cycle in NCEP (National Centers for Environmental Prediction) operations
in early May 2012. As such, the
RAP will occupy the situational-awareness / very short range niche at NCEP,
providing guidance for aviation, severe weather, and general forecast
applications. The RAP, in an
instantiation at the Earth System Research Lab in Boulder, is also used to
initialize and provide lateral boundary conditions for the High Resolution
Rapid Refresh (HRRR), discussed in a companion paper. In our presentation we will briefly review the current
operational configuration of the RAP, which uses the Gridpoint Statistical
Interpolation (GSI) as the updating analysis and the Advanced Research WRF as
the forecast model. A more
advanced Rapid Refresh, developed over the past several months using these same
building blocks, but designed to overcome certain biases in the current
operational RAP, will be reviewed in more detail, and verification results
presented. This advanced version
is expected to be implemented operationally at NCEP in 2013.