Software Release: Release of The MET Version 6.1 Verification Package

2017-12-05 | The MET development team at the DTC is pleased to announce the release of the MET version 6.1 verification package. It is available for download from the MET Users web page. The MET development team significantly enhanced the run-time performance of a number of tools, enhanced the data and file format capabilities, and added new capabilities for point observations, gridded analyses and tropical cyclone and probabilistic verification. Full details about the… Read More

Software Release: Release v3.9a of the HWRF system

Proposals for Contributions Encouraged

2017-10-16 | The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is pleased to announce the release of version 3.9a of the community HWRF modeling system. The release includes all components of the system: scripts, data preprocessing, vortex initialization, data assimilation, atmospheric and ocean models, coupler, postprocessor, and vortex tracker. Both the Scientific Documentation and the Users Guide have been updated. Read More

Software Release: Release of the MET version 6.0 Verification Package

Software Releases

Summer 2017 | The MET development team at the DTC is pleased to announce the release of the MET version 6.0 verification package. It is available for download from the MET Users web page. The MET development team significantly enhanced the run-time performance of a number of tools, enhanced the data and file format capabilities, and added new capabilities for point observations, gridded analyses and tropical cyclone and probabilistic verification. Full details about the changes for this new… Read More

Lead Story: An opportunity to grow the UFS community and the RRFS

Winter 2024 | The Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) is NOAA’s next-generation high-resolution, rapidly- updating ensemble prediction system that is underpinned by the Finite Volume Cubed Sphere (FV3) dynamical core of the Unified Forecast System (UFS). The RRFS has been in development over the past 5-7 years as part of a major collaborative effort between numerous organizations in NOAA, an ongoing partnership with the DTC, and academia.Read More

Director's Corner: How the DTC has helped build a modeling community

Winter 2024 | As I near the end of my 31+ year career with NOAA, this is a wonderful (and timely) opportunity to reflect on the last (almost) 6 years of model development and DTC engagement. The last time I provided my perspective for a Director’s Corner was during the Summer of 2018. At that time, I had recently joined NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) and was excited at the prospect of moving toward community-based model development to enhance NWS’ operational numerical weather prediction (NWP… Read More

Who's Who: Eric Gilleland

Winter 2024 | Eric Gilleland is a Project Scientist II with the Joint Numerical Testbed (JNT) at NSF NCAR. He lends his expertise to applying statistical methodology to a wide array of applications. In particular, he identifies trends in meteorological quantities within a climate context, designing new methods for comparing large spatial fields such as high-resolution weather forecast verification, and extensive work in extreme-value analysis. Eric also manages the highly successful DTC Visitor… Read More

Bridges to Operations: Technical Aspects of Generalizing the UFS to use Multiple Dynamical Cores

Winter 2024 | Following the scientific and programmatic discussions surrounding a potential shift of the Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) toward using the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) dynamical core (Carley et al. 2024), a Tiger Team was formed to scope out the technical work needed to add a second… Read More

Visitors: Cloud Overlap Evaluation for HAFS Tropical Cyclone Predictions

Winter 2024 | During their recent project for the DTC Visitor Program, Michael Iacono and John Henderson of Verisk - Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) used the newly operational Hurricane Analysis and Forecasting System (HAFS) to evaluate the impact of an improved method to represent the sub-grid variability and vertical overlap of partial cloudiness in radiative transfer calculations on tropical cyclone predictions. This work was an extended application of their exponential (EXP) cloud… Read More

Community Connections: Community Use of Common Community Physics Package Single-column Model

Winter 2024 | The Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) single-column model (SCM) is developed and supported by the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC). In addition to periodic public releases, the CCPP SCM and its applications were introduced to the community in 2020 through an AMS Short Course “Experimentation and Development of Physical Parameterizations for Numerical Weather Prediction Using a Single-Column Model and the Common Community Physics Package” and a series of workshops and… Read More

Did you know?: EPIC Support is Available

Winter 2024 | The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) provides user support and feature enhancements for select Unified Forecast System (UFS) applications, models, and components. To request new UFS features or enhancements, post a request on the ufs-community GitHub Discussions page under Enhancement Read More

Announcement: Removal of web content for Legacy software systems and UFS

2024-01-24 | The DTC is in the process of developing plans for a major overhaul of its website.  As a part of this process, the DTC will be removing the webpages for the following software systems that the DTC no longer supports at the beginning of April 2024: Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) Vortex Tracker for Tropical Cyclones Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) Hurricane WRF (HWRF) Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) containers Unified Post Processing System (UPP) If any of the… Read More

Bridges to Operations: METplus in Operations

Autumn 2023 | During the first few years of the DTC, the United States Air Force (USAF) put forth a vision for the DTC to develop a suite for verification tools that would provide reproducible results such that statistics and metrics could be shared across institutions.  The USAF envisioned a suite of tools that would include both standard verification approaches, as well as advanced diagnostic methodologies.  In 2008, the DTC released the software package, Model Evaluation Tools (MET) to the… Read More

Visitors: Cristiana Stan and Loren Doyle

Autumn 2023 | Cristiana Stan of George Mason University originally proposed a very exciting and new type of DTC visitor project that involved holding a “hack-a-thon” where teams of two graduate students would be tasked with selecting and developing a METplus Use Case for one of the subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) metrics identified during the 2021 DTC UFS Evaluation Metrics Workshop.  The winning team would then be given the opportunity to visit the DTC for up to three months to collaborate with the… Read More

Lead Story: NOAA’s New Fire Weather Testbed and DTC Fire Weather Verification

Autumn 2023 | With wildfires increasingly impacting society and ecosystems spanning local to global scales, NOAA has expanded its strategic investments and plans to address wildfire-related hazards. In 2023, NOAA established a new Fire Weather Testbed (FWT), Read More

Director's Corner: Dr. Steven Lack and Dr. Bonnie Brown

Autumn 2023 | The U.S. Air Force’s partnership with the DTC dates back to 2003 and one of the main areas of collaboration has been the advancement of scientific and technical research into a community-backed set of tools for model verification known as Model Evaluation Tools (MET) and its subsequent evolution into the METplus suite of tools. The USAF has provided financial as well as in-kind participation in governance to the DTC and in return benefits from the expansion of this tool set across many… Read More