Ten years of the COMET Residence Program

The Cooperative Program for Operational Meteorology, Education and Training (COMETâ) Residence Program is funded by the National Weather Service (NWS) for the purpose of developing and offering in-residence courses, symposia, and workshops to enhance the scientific knowledge and skills in meteorology and hydrology of a broad spectrum of professionals in the atmospheric sciences community. COMET residence classes pair lead university and operational instructors to facilitate the transfer of recent research results to the operational community. This advanced level training employs a case study approach with practical lab exercises specifically designed to reinforce concepts from lecture presentations.

Over the years, the COMET classroom, located at the UCAR Foothills Laboratory in Boulder, has evolved with the emergence of advanced computer and communications technology. The facility is equipped with co-located lecture and laboratory areas that can accommodate up to 27 students for a single course offering. The recently upgraded instructional laboratory includes nine lab stations, each consisting of an HP-C3000 Unix workstation running AWIPS, GARP and other analysis and display packages, and a dual processor Pentium PC for a variety of applications including real-time local mesoscale model simulations. The separate instructor workstation area is connected to a large screen video display. For the past five years, traditional lecture sessions have been supplemented by presentation via video teleconferences. Recently the program has been experimenting with live broadcast and presentation archives using Webcast technology. The Residence Program maintains an active Web site that contains supporting electronic presentation materials and is freely accessible to users in the government and private sector weather services and the university community at: http://www.comet.ucar.edu/class/index.html.

In the past decade, the COMET Residence Program has presented over 90 course offerings and over 140,000 student hours of instruction on a variety of subjects. Students from the NWS, the Air Force Weather Agency, the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, the private sector, and several foreign weather services have taken courses in mesoscale analysis and prediction, hydrometeorology, and satellite meteorology, and symposia on mesoscale convective systems and numerical weather prediction. The COMET Program has worked to enhance university instruction by offering five courses to over 80 university faculty on a variety of subjects, including mesoscale meteorology, numerical weather prediction, satellite meteorology, and hydrometeorology. In addition, the residence classroom recently became the host site for the NWS Operational Support Facility Training Branch's warning-decision-making workshops for NWS forecasters.

The Residence Program is currently developing a number of new courses, including a hydrometeorology course aimed at forecasters from NWS River Forecast Centers and the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center, an intense precipitation and flash flood course for NWS Science and Operations Officers, and a remote sensing applications course for NWS satellite focal points. Residence Program staff are also assisting with development of a structured distance learning course in aviation meteorology containing Web-based content modules supplemented with teletraining exercises emphasizing forecast applications.