The COMET® Program's Training for Hydrometeorology and Hydro-Climate R2O

The COMET Program, located at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, formed in 1989 to facilitate research-to-operations for the modernization of NOAA’s National Weather Service. Nearly 30 years later COMET continues to develop and deliver interactive training, both instructor-led and self-paced online, to support using new technologies and scientific advances in operations. Today the COMET Program training reaches a much larger and more diverse set of users in multiple levels of government, both domestic and international, as well as users in the university community, private enterprise, and the broadcast meteorologist community. Topic areas include many subtopics in meteorology, climate science, hydrology, space weather, oceanography, geospatial information, and other geoscience-related disciplines. This presentation focuses on training that supports research-to-operations in hydrometeorology and hydroclimate.

In collaboration with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) the COMET Program has delivered online courses in hydrological sciences for the past nine years that have reached over 400 attendees in 92 nations. The online lessons that make up these courses were adapted from training originally developed for NWS forecasters who needed training in hydrology. In 2017 the COMET Program, in collaboration with the NWS and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), developed online lessons explaining the science and operational uses of the Hydrologic Ensemble Forecast Service (HEFS) and the National Water Model (NWM). These lessons are designed to help facilitate the use of the HEFS and the NWM in operations. Beginning in 2013 the COMET Program, in collaboration with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, developed and delivered instructor-led and online training focused on water resources planning in a changing climate. As of summer 2017, nine instructor-led courses and a dozen online lessons have supported this effort which has benefitted users in federal, municipal, and tribal government agencies, as well as universities, privation companies, and international users.

All of the COMET Program’s material is supported by the MetEd website, www.meted.ucar.edu, which includes a quiz tracking system, lesson descriptions, a graphics library, and in some cases translations (mainly Spanish) for non-English speakers.