A functionally similar environment for testing and evaluation of community advances in ensemble numerical weather prediction

The Ensembles task of the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) conducts testing and evaluation activities for transition to operations. For example, testing for the NCEP SREF application will be focused on providing input to EMC on potential candidates for aspects of the ensemble system's configuration. For DTC to conduct these tests, we use a SREF functionally similar testing environment (FSTE). While results of our tests (replacing SREF's Ensemble Transform with Rescaling (ETR) technique with a cycling perturbations technique, and modifying the representation of model perturbations by replacing the SREF physics suite with a promising physics suite from the real-time Hydrometeorology Testbed (HMT) ensemble) will be discussed in this presentation, we will also discuss how this FSTE was developed.