MRMS Transition to NOAA Operations

To meet National Weather Service's “Weather Ready Nation,” NextGen Weather, and Integrated Water Resource Services (IWRS) initiatives, objectives, and requirements, the MRMS system will be transitioned to operations at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) on the Integrated Dissemination Program's (IDP) enterprise processing infrastructure.

The system ingests base‐level data from more than 140 Weather Surveillance Radars, 88 Doppler (WSR‐88D), 31 Canadian C‐band weather radars, and 14 FAA Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) radars and generates three dimensional (3D) radar reflectivity mosaic and Quantitative Precipitation Estimates (QPE) products in real time over the conterminous United States (CONUS) at a 1‐km horizontal resolution and 2‐min update cycle.

The MRMS system is fully automated and has been running in real time, experimentally, since June 2006. The experimental products are provided to users from government agencies, universities, research institutions, and the private sector and have been utilized in various meteorological, aviation, and hydrological applications. The integration of the MRMS software into operations within the NCEP's national centers and NWS is the culmination of a decade long research‐to‐operations (R2O) effort between the NWS, NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), and other federal and state agencies.

The data products produced from MRMS will serve as a basis for the development of improved data assimilation and analysis for ingest into high‐resolution numerical weather prediction models in support of NextGen, the NWS Warn‐on‐Forecast effort, increased situational awareness at NWS field offices for hazardous weather and water, and forecast verification. Users include the entire weather and climate enterprise within both the public and private sectors. The rich data sets created by the MRMS software represents a major step forward in providing state‐of‐the‐art 3D radar mosaics towards supporting activities related to achieving a Weather‐Ready Nation. The presentation will encompass a detailed description of the MRMS system and future plans after operational implementation.