2011 - Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences ...

the community HWRF is performing as well as operational
HWRF, enabling a transition of the community code to NCEP
for the 2011 hurricane season.
The community HWRF model has been upgraded to
contain the capabilities of the 2010 operational model
and of the 2011 operational baseline (a starting point for
developing the 2011 operational model). Extensive tests
have been conducted to show that the forecasts produced
with the community model have similar average forecast
skill as those generated at NOAA NCEP; an exact match is
not expected due to differences in computer platform. The
results from these tests have been made available at http://
verif.rap.ucar.edu/eval/hwrf_hnr2_hr20/, where a final
report is posted.
This extensive test, which employed 1,190 cases from 53
storms of the North Atlantic and Eastern North Pacific
basins for the 2008, 2009 and 2010 seasons, was the first
comprehensive hurricane test conducted by the DTC, and
was also used to qualify DTC’s functionally similar testing
and evaluation infrastructure.
The community code has been transitioned to be used
at NCEP for the 2011 hurricane season, indicating that the
research and operational communities are now using the
same code base, which facilitates the transition of new
developments to operations.
Figure 1: Mean and 95% confidence intervals of tropical cyclone position
errors (nautical miles) as a function of forecast lead time (hours) for two
configurations of the 2011 baseline of the HWRF model. HNR2 (black) is
configured from the community HWRF model and run by the DTC. HR20
(red) is a corresponding run done by NOAA/NCEP. Both configurations
show that track errors increase linearly with time from near zero to over 250
nm at the five-day forecast. The forecasts from the two configurations are
statistically indistinguishable, indicating that the operational model has
been adequately ported to the community code repositories and qualifying
the DTC functionally similar testing infrastructure.
Milestone 2. Maintain the code repositories for Gridpoint
Statistical Interpolation (GSI) and Hurricane-Weather
Research and Forecasting model (HWRF) and provide user
support for both codes (helpdesk, website, code distribution,
and documentation).
During the last year, the DTC has provided user support
for both the HWRF model and the GSI. GSI and HWRF
have more than 300 and 170 registered users, respectively.
Approximately 30 questions are answered by the email
helpdesk for each system every month.
GSI v3 was released, and work has been done toward
the HWRF v3.3a release planned for July 2011. The users’
guide, websites (http://www.dtcenter.org/com-GSI/users/
and http://www.dtcenter.org/HurrWRF/users/),
case studies and tutorial instructions were updated for
both systems. Tutorials for the HWRF and GSI systems
were offered in April and June 2011, respectively.
Maintenance of the community GSI and HWRF repositories
continued to transition all operational upgrades to the
community code and to incorporate the community code
onto NOAA NCEP operations. This process ensures that
the code used by the academic and operational communities
remains connected, which facilitates transfer of new
research to operations.
Students and instructors of the April 2011 Hurricane WRF Tutorial.
GSD-06 Environmental Information Systems
FEDERAL LEAD: PATRICIA MILLER
CIRES LEAD: LEON BENJAMIN
NOAA Goal 3: Weather and Water
Project Goal: Develop information systems that deliver atmospheric
observation data and environmental products to users
of weather, water and climate information.
Milestone 1. Complete Final Operating Capability of the
Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS) at
the National Weather Service.
MADIS ingests data files from NOAA data sources and
non-NOAA data providers, decodes the data and then
encodes all of the observational data into a common format
with uniform observation units and time stamps. Qualitycontrol
checks
are conducted,
and the integrated
data
sets are stored
in the MADIS
database with
a series of flags
indicating the
quality of the
observation
from a variety
of perspectives (e.g., temporal consistency and spatial consistency),
or more precisely, a series of flags indicating the
results of various quality-control checks.
The completion of the Final Operating Capability (FOC) of
MADIS at the National Weather Service (NWS) is in progress.
Transition to the NWS includes three major milestones:
start of transition (Sept. 15, 2008), Initial Operating Capability
(IOC) (completed Sept. 30, 2010) and Full Operating
Capability (FOC). At IOC MADIS has a primary system
CIRES Annual Report 2011 97