DART: Tools and Support for Ensemble Data Assimilation Research, Operations, and Education

The Data Assimilation Research Testbed (DART) is a community facility for ensemble data assimilation developed and supported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research. DART provides a comprehensive suite of software, documentation, examples and tutorials that can be used for ensemble data assimilation research, operations, and education. Scientists and software engineers from the Data Assimilation Research Section at NCAR are available to actively support DART users who want to use existing DART products or develop their own new applications. Current DART users range from university professors teaching data assimilation, to individual graduate students working with simple models, through national laboratories doing operational prediction with large state-of-the-art models. DART runs efficiently on many computational platforms ranging from laptops through thousands of cores on the newest supercomputers.

This poster focuses on recent developments for coupled data assimilation with DART and NCAR's Community Earth System Model. DART interfaces to the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM), the Parallel Ocean Program (POP) and the Community Land Model (CLM) can now be used to do multiple component data assimilation with the fully-coupled CESM prediction model. The software innovations required to enable this are described. The latest results for ensemble assimilation experiments with each of the component models are presented along with initial comparisons to corresponding assimilations with the coupled model. A newly developed DART interface to the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM) is now available. An overview of results of the relative value of assimilating tropospheric and middle atmosphere observations in WACCM is presented.

DART is also used with many other types of geophysical models. Highlights of the latest results using DART with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model for springtime weather over the central United States are also presented.

The poster includes instructions on how to get started using DART for research or educational applications.