Transitioning Research to the Operational Hurricane WRF model: Overview of the Developmental Testbed Center Support and Testing Activities

To accelerate the transition of research to operations and facilitate code access for the research community, the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) has partnered with the Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) to provide support for the Hurricane WRF (HWRF) modeling system. The HWRF model is a fully coupled atmosphere-ocean model with sophisticated initialization procedures, and a set of postprocessing and vortex tracking tools, run operationally for all global basins.

The DTC provides support to both the general community and active developers for the HWRF system. HWRF v3.7a was released in August 2015, which includes the 2015 operational capabilities, as well as research capabilities such as alternate physics suites and idealized simulations. The code, its documentation, and supporting materials can be accessed through the DTC website (www.dtcenter.org). Because the HWRF code is undergoing rapid development, the DTC also engages with active developers from multiple government institutions and universities in support of collaboration and exchange of the continuously evolving code. Developers funded through the DTC visitor program are also supported to partner with the DTC to work in areas aimed at improvement to operational numerical guidance.

Additionally, the DTC performs independent testing directed at evaluating research innovations that show promise for operational implementation. This presentation will provide an overview of the DTC mechanisms that aid in the transition of research to operations, including user and developer support, the DTC visitor program, code management procedures, and testing and evaluation. Successful R2O transitions, such as DTCs involvement in the 2015 operational implementation of the Rapid Radiative Transfer Model-Global (RRTMG) radiation and partial cloudiness scheme for HWRF will be highlighted.