The Developmental Testbed Center: Facilitating Transition between Research and Operation in Numerical Weather Prediction

The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is a distributed center, located in Boulder, Colorado, with a mission to facilitate the transition between research and operation in numerical weather prediction (NWP). The two primary units of the DTC reside in the Joint Numerical Testbed of NCAR's Research Application Laboratory and the Global Systems Division of NOAA's Earth Systems Research Laboratory. To fulfill its mission, the DTC focuses its efforts on two areas: (1) providing user support for the community NWP systems, and (2) performing testing and evaluation of community NWP systems to support research and operations. Currently, the DTC, in collaboration with the Mesocale and Microscale Meteorology (MMM) Division of NCAR and NCEP's Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), provides support for the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) modeling system, WRF for Hurricanes, the Grid-point Statistical Interpolation (GSI) data assimilation system, and the Model Evaluation Tools (MET). This user support includes annual (or bi-annual) tutorials, workshops, help-desk and documentation. Examples of community system testing and evaluation include WRF Reference Configurations, and testing of the community repository code for operational hurricane prediction and the GSI system. With increased interest from the community on mesoscale ensemble prediction, DTC has started the development of the DTC Ensemble Testbed (DET), with a goal to test and evaluate critical components of an ensemble prediction system and to provide community support for community ensemble codes. DTC also collaborates with the Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) and Hydrometeorology Testbed (HMT) on the evaluation of mesoscale ensemble prediction of severe weather and quantitative precipitation forecast. In addition, the DTC hosts a Visitor Program to promote the interaction between the research and operational NWP communities. The DTC Visitor Program has recently been expanded to include support for graduate students to work on NWP research that has a potential for operational applications. In this presentation, we will give an overview of the DTC, and highlight recent activities with a focus on research to operation transition.