Developmental Testbed Center: Facilitating R2O for Numerical Weather Prediction

The primary mission of the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is to facilitate the transition of research related to Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) into operations. To fulfill this mission, the DTC (i) provides user and developer support for community NWP systems in close collaboration with the system developers, (ii) performs testing and evaluation of promising new NWP techniques, as well as the operational systems, to inform the operational implementation process, and (iii) promotes the interaction and collaboration between research and operational NWP communities through special workshops, tutorials and the DTC Visitor Program. When the DTC was first established, the initial focus was the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. Over the years, the scope and activities of the DTC have expanded in response to the needs of operational centers and the research community. Today, the DTC provides support for seven community systems, including WRF, UPP (Unified Post-Processor), HWRF (Hurricane WRF), GFDL vortex tracker (a component of HWRF), GSI and EnKF data assimilation systems, and the MET (Model Evaluation Tools) verification system. This work has been valuable in encouraging the research community to use operational NWP systems for research applications, and has contributed to their continued improvement. Currently, the DTC focuses its activities in five task areas: regional ensembles, data assimilation, hurricanes, verification and global modeling. The global modeling task area was added in 2015, in response to a request from the NWS NGGPS (Next Generation Global Prediction System) Program Office, to establish a Global Model Test Bed (GMTB). In this presentation, we will provide an overview of the current state of the DTC and our vision for the future direction of the DTC.