The Developmental Testbed Center and its Winter Forecasting Experiment

Authors:
  • LNLouisa Nance
    Louisa Nance
  • SKSteve Koch
    Steve Koch
  • ESEdward Szoke
    Edward Szoke
  • TFTressa Fowler
    Tressa Fowler
  • ALAndrew Loughe
    Andrew Loughe
  • JMJennifer Luppens Mahoney
    Jennifer Luppens Mahoney
  • HCHui-Ya Chuang
    Hui-Ya Chuang
  • MPMatthew Pyle
    Matthew Pyle
  • RGRobert Gall
    Robert Gall
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Abstract
The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) was formed to promote exchanges between the development and operational communities in the field of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP). The WRF DTC serves to accelerate the transfer of NWP technology from research to operations and to support a subset of the current WRF operational configurations to the general community. This article describes the mission and recent activities of the WRF DTC, including a detailed discussion about one of its recent projects, the WRF DTC Winter Forecasting Experiment (DWFE). DWFE was planned and executed by the WRF DTC in collaboration with forecasters and model developers. The real-time phase of the experiment took place in the winter of 2004/05, with two dynamic cores of the WRF model being run once per day out to 48 h. The models were configured with 5-km grid spacing over the entire continental United States to ascertain the value of high-resolution numerical guidance for winter weat...