Shao, Hui, National Center for Atmospheric Research,
M. Hu, NOAA/ESRL, D. Stark, K. Newman, C. Zhou, X. Y. Huang, NCAR, John Derber,
and Michael Lueken, NCEP/EMC
The Developmental
Testbed Center (DTC) is a distributed facility to serve as a bridge between
research and operations and facilitate the activities of the Numerical Weather
Prediction (NWP) community. Over past three years, the DTC has been supporting
the Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) data assimilation (DA) system for
the research community. The DTC has released three versions of the community
GSI system and hosted two GSI tutorials and one GSI workshop in Boulder, CO.
The DTC provides community support through the DTC GSI webpage and GSI
helpdesk. In addition to providing a community resource, the DTC also serves as
a bridge among several development groups. For this purpose, the DTC created
and maintains the community GSI repository and organizes the GSI review
committee.
The DTC is also testing
and evaluating DA techniques and systems primarily in regional applications. In
addition to testing GSI, the DTC is expanding its horizons to advanced
assimilation techniques and systems, including ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF)
and GSI based hybrid variational-ensemble (GSI-Hybrid) data assimilation
systems. The DTC staff started collaboration with code developers to
investigate and test candidate systems to be supported in the future.
This paper will
introduce the ongoing DTC data assimilation community efforts on these various
techniques and systems, their current status, and future plans. Some
preliminary testing and evaluation results will be presented as well.