Developmental Testbed Center: Facilitating R2O for Numerical Weather Prediction

The primary mission of the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is to facilitate the transition of research related to Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) into operations. To fulfill this mission, the DTC (i) provides user and developer support for community NWP systems in close collaboration with the system developers, (ii) performs testing and evaluation of promising new NWP techniques, as well as the operational systems, to inform the operational implementation process, and (iii) promotes the interaction and collaboration between research and operational NWP communities through special workshops, tutorials and the DTC Visitor Program. When the DTC was first established, the initial focus was the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. Over the years, the scope and activities of the DTC have expanded in response to the needs of operational centers and the research community. Today, the DTC provides support for nine community systems, including WRF, UPP (Unified Post-Processor), HWRF (Hurricane WRF), GFDL vortex tracker (model-independent vortex tracking), GSI (Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation) and EnKF (Ensemble Kalman Filter) data assimilation systems, the MET (Model Evaluation Tools) verification system and more recently the CCPP (Common Community Physics Package) and a Single Column Model (SCM). This work has been valuable in encouraging the research community to use operational NWP systems for research applications, and has contributed to their continued improvement. As NOAA moves towards a new Unified Forecast System, the DTC will be evolving its support and testing activities to stay in step with its operational partners. Standing up a user support capability for the convective-allowing model (CAM) application of UFS is an initial step in this transition. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of the how the DTC is currently engaging the operational and research communities in the research to operations (R2O) transition and an outlook for the future.