Building Test and Evaluation Systems for Development of the Rapid Refresh Forecast System Toward Operational Applications

The Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) is NOAA’s next generation regional convective-scale ensemble forecast system under development for the National Weather Service. RRFS is jointly developed by EMC and GSL along with the wider Unified Forecast System (UFS) community. RRFS is targeted to replace many current regional and storm scale operational NWP systems such as High Resolution Ensemble Forecast System (HREF), Rapid Refresh (RAP), High Resolution Rapid refresh (HRRR), North American Mesoscale Forecast System (NAM) + nests, etc.

As a complicated data assimilation and forecast system under fast development, the RRFS has been continually tested and evaluated through real-time parallel runs, retrospective experiments, and several NOAA testbed experiments. The results from those tests provide key information for the developers to further develop and tune the RRFS system for meeting the operation requirements. In this talk, we will introduce such a complex testing system used for evaluating the RRFS development and discuss the challenges of building and maintaining such a system for the purposes of developing an operational system.