Introduction to Community Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation System (GSI) and its User Support

Over the last three years, the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) has made a significant investment transitioning the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) operational data assimilation system, Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI), to a community resource. The DTC, as of the summer of 2010, has released two versions of community GSI system. Each release has come with its own corresponding User's Guide. The DTC has also hosted the 1st Community GSI tutorial in Boulder CO, and built a community GSI User's Page (http://www.dtcenter.org/com-GSI/users/index.php) to serve as a web resource to provide documents and on-line tutorials for the research community. During the same time, the DTC staff has increased their expertise with GSI installation, running, and problem solving and has been providing support to the GSI user community through gsi_help@ucar.edu since the release of version 1 of the community code.

In addition to providing a community resource, the DTC also serves as a bridge among several development groups. For this purpose, the DTC has created and maintains the community GSI repository, an extended regression test suite, and organizes the GSI review committee.

This talk will introduce the history of the DTC community GSI project, its current status, and future plans, with an emphasis on the current GSI user support system and how it may help current and potential users to better use these sources.