Kuo, Y.-H., National Center for Atmospheric Research,
L. Nance, NCAR, Z. Toth, ESRL, and B. Brown, NCAR
The primary mission of
the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is to facilitate the transition from
research to operations in numerical weather prediction. To fulfill this
mission, the DTC (i) provides user support for the community Numerical Weather
Prediction (NWP) systems, and (ii) performs testing and evaluation of modeling
systems or their components to support research and operation communities. Currently,
the DTC focuses its activities in five task areas,: mesoscale modeling, data
assimilation, hurricane, ensemble and verification. In collaboration with the
Mesocale and Microscale Meteorology (MMM) Division of NCAR and the
Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) of the National Centers for Environmental
Prediction (NCEP), the DTC has provided support for the Weather Research and
Forecasting (WRF) modeling system, the WRF for Hurricanes (HWRF) model, the
Grid-point Statistical Interpolation (GSI) data assimilation model, and the
Model Evaluation Tools (MET). In the area of model testing and evaluation, DTC
has performed WRF reference configuration testing, HWRF cumulus
parameterization testing, evaluation of high-resolution cloud-permitting
ensembles in precipitation forecast associated with Hazardous Weather Testbed
(HWT); and has evaluated downscaling and bias correction schemes for NCEP Short
Range Ensemble Forecast (SREF) implementation. In this presentation, we will
discuss highlights of the results from these recent testing and evaluation
activities.