The NWS/COMET case study library in the new millennium

The Cooperative Program for Operational Meteorology, Education and Training (COMET) Case Study Library provides meteorological datasets to the university and operational communities. Funded by the National Weather Service (NWS) Office of Meteorology, this project is a collaborative venture between the NWS, UCAR's COMET Program, Unidata, and the Joint Office for Science Support (JOSS). In the new millennium, the COMET Case Study Library will expand to increase the number of regionally focused cases covering a variety of phenomena and will evolve to support new technologies and datasets. The deployment of AWIPS in NWS offices necessitates the delivery of data in formats supported by the AWIPS software. The CODIAC system, used to distribute the case study data, will be adapted to handle these data formats. Future cases are being selected to include data archived for the AWIPS system.

The cases included in the COMET Case Study Library were selected to represent both classical weather phenomena as well as local effects on weather systems and regional differences in summer-time convection and winter storms. In an effort to continue to select cases both of interest to the university community and of operational significance to forecasters, we are collaborating with university faculty and NWS Science and Operations Officers (SOOs) to choose interesting cases and to develop lab exercises to supplement the data. Also, the library contains cases contributed directly by the university community.

This paper presents our plans for improvement and expansion of the CODIAC system and gives an overview of the future cases intended for the case study library.