Community Support and Testing of the Hurricane WRF model at the Developmental Testbed Center

In this presentation we will describe the support provided by the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) for the Community Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF). The last release of HWRF (v3.3a) was done in August 2011, and it contains the capabilities of the 2011 operational HWRF model. The code is available for download from the DTC website, along with extensive documentation and test datasets. A benchmark of the code will be presented, in order to make public the skill in track and intensity forecast of the community HWRF.

Work done at the DTC with experimental configurations of HWRF will also be described. The DTC supports HWRF developers from multiple institutions (NOAA/NCEP, NOAA/AOML, NOAA/ESRL, and universities) in using the latest research configurations of the code and has an infrastructure that allows developers to collaborate and exchange code. Testing conducted on experimental configurations of HWRF, including a triple-nested setup will be presented and contrasted with the operational configuration.