An Overview of the 1st Hybrid NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed Spring Forecasting Experiment in 2023

The 2023 Spring Forecasting Experiment (2023 SFE) will be conducted from 1 May – 2 June 2023 by the Experimental Forecast Program (EFP) of the NOAA/Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT), and co-led by the NWS/Storm Prediction Center (SPC) and OAR/National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL). After three years of virtual experiments, this will be the first experiment with in-person participation since 2019. Additionally, we’ll continue to have virtual participation in the 2023 SFE, making 2023 the first hybrid experiment. The 2023 SFE will feature experimental model contributions from NOAA Global Systems Laboratory (GSL), NOAA/NCEP Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), NOAA/OAR National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL), the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. With tentative plans for operational implementation of the Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) in 2024, SFE 2023 will make it a point of emphasis to evaluate the RRFS against the operational High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) and High-Resolution Ensemble Forecast (HREF) systems for severe weather forecasting applications. New testing and evaluation activities for SFE 2023 will include examinations of regional and global-with-nest versions of the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS), and new extended range (Days 3-8) CAM ensemble evaluations. Experimental forecasting activities will involve generation of severe weather outlooks at Days 1-4 and short-term forecasting activities centered around NSSL’s prototype Warn-on-Forecast System (WoFS). The main goals of this talk/poster will be to summarize SFE 2023 activities and highlight some preliminary results.