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

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 (v3.5a) was done in August 2013, and it contains the capabilities of the 2013 operational HWRF model. In addition, support for all Northern Heisphere basins and for idelized simulations is now provided. The code is available for download from the DTC website (www.dtcenter.og) , along with extensive documentation and test datasets.

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, universities etc.) in using the latest research configurations of the code and has an infrastructure that allows developers to collaborate and exchange code. Mechanisms to support transition of new research to operations, including procedures for testing new code, will be presented.