An Historical Overview of NOAA’s National Blend of Models (NBM) (Invited Presentation)

The Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013 (Sandy Supplemental) afforded the National Weather Service (NWS) an opportunity to implement a national-scale, centrally produced, suite of blended model products based on NWS regional blends and advanced post-processing techniques developed at the Office of Atmospheric and Oceanic Research. The intent of the NBM is to provide forecasters with a nationally consistent and skillful suite of calibrated forecast guidance as a starting point in the NWS forecast process. This broad initiative has required the cooperation, coordination, and support at all levels throughout the NWS organization. To this end, several teams were established including the Science Advisory Group (SAG) to vet the quality of science being integrated into the NBM, and the Verification Team whose primary responsibility is to verify the quality of NBM guidance. Throughout the past five years these teams along with several others have been pivotal in advancing NBM science and in keeping the communication lines open between researchers, NWS forecasters, and the developers at the Meteorological Development Laboratory (MDL). In this talk, we will provide a historical overview of the various NBM support teams along with the more notable NBM scientific achievements.