The Developmental Testbed Center: Update on Data Assimilation System Testing and Community Support

The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is a distributed facility to serve as a bridge between research and operations and facilitate the activities of the Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) community. Over past three years, the DTC has been supporting the Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) system for the research community. The DTC is also testing the GSI data assimilation system in regional applications.

This paper will give an update on the ongoing DTC data assimilation community service, including the latest code capabilities. It will also give a summary on the latest GSI test activities conducted by the DTC. These tests include the pre-implementation tests and evaluation of the GSI configuration and its tuning and the forecast impact study of regional background errors. It also includes some tests conducted using the GSI based hybrid ensemble-variational system (GSI-hybrid) for tropical storm forecasts.