Development of NCEP's Nonhydrostatic Mesoscale Model within WRF: Description and forecast guidance

Work continues in developing NCEP's Nonhydrostatic Mesoscale Model (NMM) within the framework of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) effort. High resolution runs with 8 km gridpoint spacing are being made daily for separate domains over the western, central, and eastern CONUS as well as Alaska. These forecasts use boundary and initial conditions generated from a version of the Standard Initialization (SI) procedure of WRF. Specific forecast examples will be presented which indicate various types of guidance provided by these runs. In addition results will be shown describing special daily forecasts that were made using 4.5 km gridpoint spacing over a large portion of the central U.S. and in which no explicit convective parameterization was invoked. These latter forecasts were produced for the 2004 spring program of NCEP's Storm Prediction Center in order to offer forecasters there the opportunity to view and assess the quality of guidance provided by such high resolution NMM runs during the height of the convective season.