GSI Data Assimilation System: Community Support and Preliminary Testing Results

The Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) 3D-Var system is currently part of NOAA/NCEP's operational Global Forecast System (GFS), North American Mesoscale (NAM) Model, and Real-Time Mesoscale Analysis (RTMA), and will be part of the WRF Rapid Refresh system, which is slated to replace the Rapid Update Cycle run at NCEP in early 2010. It is also planned to become operational at the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA) by the end of 2010 or the beginning of 2011. In terms of the WRF community, the WRF Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) has added the GSI DA system to the NWP code it supports and provided an official GSI code release starting from 2009. Currently, the DTC is working closely with the NCEP/EMC, NCAR/RAL/DATC, NOAA/ESRL/GSD and NCAR/ESSL/MMM to conduct testing and evaluation of the evolving GSI system. This paper will introduce the current efforts on the DTC's GSI community release and support and present some preliminary testing results on the end-to-end system of WRF and GSI in regional applications.