[Wrf-users] DTC Announcement of Opportunity

[Pam Johnson]

Greetings,

If you are interested in submitting a proposal, please do so by April 30th.






        Announcement of Opportunity


  with the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF)


  Developmental Testbed Center

The WRF Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) Visitor Program is pleased to 
announce that approximately seven new visitor appointments will be 
available for the year beginning June 15, 2007. These appointments will 
enable visitors to work with the DTC in testing new techniques, models, 
and model components for numerical weather prediction. The goal is to 
provide the operational weather prediction centers, NCEP, AFWA and 
FNMOC, with options for near-term advances in operational weather 
forecasting and to provide researchers with numerical weather prediction 
(NWP) codes that represent the latest advances in the technology.

Successful applicants will be offered up to one month of salary 
compensation, travel and per diem. The visitors are expected to spend 
one month with the DTC in Boulder, Colorado, in Monterey, California, or 
at one of the operational centers. This one-month visit can be 
distributed over several weeks during a one-year period. Access to DTC 
computational resources will enable significant portions of the 
visitor’s project to be conducted from their home institution.

*1.0 **The WRF Developmental **Testbed** **Center** (DTC)*

The WRF program includes plans for the rapid and direct transfer of new 
research results into the NWP process of the National Weather Service 
(NWS) and other operational NWP centers. It also includes plans for 
providing the research community with the latest NWP technology and 
access to the operational models for various research projects. The WRF 
effort embodies the concept of the operational and research communities 
working jointly toward development of next generation NWP capabilities 
that will allow, as new techniques are developed in the research 
community, the most promising results to be rapidly and efficiently 
transferred to operations. **

The DTC is a distributed facility in which the operational and research 
communities will work closely together in developing and testing the 
next generation numerical forecast systems. In the development process, 
researchers will be invited to work within the DTC with Center personnel 
and with members of the operational community and for members of the 
operational community to work with researchers to demonstrate the 
promise of new techniques in NWP. In addition, members of both the 
operational and research community will be able to evaluate the current 
operational models through retrospective analysis and diagnosis of their 
strengths and weaknesses. A key objective of the DTC is to offer to the 
research community an environment that is /functionally similar /to that 
used in operations to test and evaluate new NWP methods, without 
interfering with actual day-to-day operations of the operational centers.

The DTC includes components in Boulder, Colorado and at the Naval 
Research Laboratory in Monterey, California; the component in Boulder is 
referred to as the Boulder DTC and the component in Monterey, California 
is referred to as the NRL DTC. In addition, the Boulder DTC is composed 
of components at NOAA's Global Systems Division (GSD DTC) and NCAR (NCAR 
DTC). The visitor could be associated with any of the three components; 
those visiting Boulder would be primarily located at NCAR but would 
interact with DTC personnel at both NCAR and GSD. In addition, since a 
goal of the DTC is to transition research into operations, a visitor to 
the DTC could also be associated with any of the operational centers 
such as EMC at NCEP.

*2.0 **The WRF Code system*

The WRF code systems will consist of three formal levels: Contributed 
Code, Reference Code, and Operational Code. Management of the 
Contributed and Reference Codes, as well as how researchers can 
contribute to these codes, is currently being discussed; results of 
these discussions will be made public when available. Below we describe 
in general terms each of the three code categories.

*2.1 Contributed Code*

Contributed Code will be the most informal class of code in the WRF 
system. The main requirements for inclusion in this category are that 
the code is compliant with the WRF coding infrastructure and that the 
technique addresses a potential operational weather forecast need or 
represents an advancement in NWP technology. Generally the codes' 
authors will maintain these codes, but it is expected that they will be 
made available to the community through a code repository maintained by 
NCAR/MMM and the DTC. Visitors to the DTC could conduct tests on 
components of the Contributed Codes.

*2.2 Reference Code*

This set of code will be the heart of the WRF system. Reference Code 
will consist of carefully selected tested codes and will have available 
results of tests conducted by the DTC, including a limited set of 
verification statistics. It will also contain the configuration of the 
latest WRF codes being run operationally (updated on the order of twice 
a year). This code will be fully maintained by the DTC and will be made 
available to the community. Users of the DTC will work primarily with 
the Reference Code.

The initial Reference Code contains multiple WRF cores, physics options, 
initialization systems, post-processing systems and a verification 
system. This will be expanded in the future to contain the components to 
replicate the hurricane WRF system, data assimilation systems, an 
advanced verification system. Eventually it may contain the operational 
global forecast models. Currently the WRF Reference Code consists of two 
dynamical cores; the Non- Hydrostatic Mesoscale Model (NMM) and the 
Advanced Research WRF (ARW). There are two complete physics packages, 
one from NCEP that was designed to work with the NMM core and one from 
NCAR that is part of the ARW core and the NCEP verification system. Each 
of these packages can be interchanged between the cores as can 
components of the physics. Where applicable, visitors are encouraged to 
work with both WRF cores.

*2.3 Operational Codes***

*/ /*The Operational Codes are the fully-hardened, fully-tested codes 
that are being run operationally at the various operational centers. 
This level of code will be maintained by the Operational Testbed Centers 
(OTC) at the operational centers but made available to the community 
through the DTC. These Operational Codes are a subset of the Reference 
Code and, as such, are also candidates for researchers' attention at the 
DTC. A goal of producing incremental upgrades to address weaknesses in 
existing Operational components will be viewed as a valid topic for DTC 
applicants.

*3.0 **How to Respond to this Announcement*

* *In section 4.0, possible projects that are of interest to the DTC are 
outlined. These are general, and proposals for participation in the 
visitor program should provide details on the specific work that the 
visitor would conduct with the DTC. This proposal should be described in 
a document no longer than 5 pages. The submitted material should include 
a brief one-page summary of the project, a C.V. of no more than 2 pages, 
and a budget for 1-2 months of salary for the PI and travel costs. As 
noted above, it is expected that the visitor will spend one month in 
residence at one of the distributed DTC sites and that the total 
duration of the project can continue for one year. It is expected that 
the visitor will be able to continue the work from his or her own 
institution using DTC computational resources.

Proposals in response to this announcement should be sent by April 30, 
2007 to:

Pam Johnson
NCAR/DTC
P.O. Box 3000
Boulder, Colorado 80307

Express mail address: 3450 Mitchell Lane, Boulder, CO, 80301

Or send electronically to: johnsonp at ucar.edu


        4.0 Possible Visitor Projects with the WRF DTC

This is a general announcement of an opportunity to work with the WRF 
DTC to test existing WRF-based NWP systems in order to assess where they 
are deficient, and to assess new NWP technology that shows promise of 
improving numerical weather prediction within the next five years. This 
could include testing new physics parameterization components, 
optimizing physics packages, comparing dynamic cores, alternative 
verification approaches, data assimilation systems, as well as 
investigations of the impacts of resolution and the tradeoffs between an 
ensemble versus a deterministic approach.

Some more specific suggested topics that would receive special 
consideration include:

   1. Add the ability for the NMM core to test ideal cases such as what
      conditions in the model dictate flow splitting and going around a
      barrier as opposed to rising
      up and flowing over it. NCEP has noted some interesting (and
      different)
      behavior between the cores for the Black Hills of South Dakota as
      an example. This task may address the more general topic of
      behavior of mountain induced flows in the WRF models.

   2. There are a number of new PBL schemes that are being tested in the
      community that might be a welcome addition to the WRF system. A
      possible project therefore is to add a new boundary layer
      parameterization scheme to the WRF physics options, and test and
      compare this scheme with existing schemes both in idealized
      one-dimensional cases, and in full NWP-type simulations. This
      testing could be extended to seasonal verifications for
      statistical evaluation, using the DTC datasets, and collaborating
      with DTC staff.

   3. In the next couple of years the DTC will be enabling an ensemble
      capability to provide to the user community. The DTC would welcome
      visitors who want to assist us in assembling an end-to-end
      ensemble modeling system including components to generate an
      ensemble and post processing components specific to ensemble systems.

   4. How much smoothing is "necessary" for the underlying terrain in
      the WRF cores? This depends on the inherent model smoothing and so
      may be core- dependent. The core comparisons conducted by the DTC
      made some attempt to make the underlying terrain as identical as
      possible in both cores but this is difficult because of the use of
      different grids. A possible project therefore is to make the
      terrain as identical as possible and conduct some retests to
      determine if the core differences get smaller or remain the same.
      Experiments can also be proposed for other tests of the WRF models
      to their sensitivity to terrain treatments such as form drag and
      mountain blocking. The core tests are being extended this summer
      to longer time intervals and higher resolutions. A visitor
      interested in this project can work with the DTC in evaluating or
      perhaps further extending these tests.

A related topic would be for a visitor to work closely with DTC staff 
currently investigating the ability of various WRF model configurations 
at high resolution to properly simulate observed mountain wave structure 
and dynamics. Particular interest is focused on use of special T-REX 
datasets to verify model forecasts, and also the development and testing 
of different numerical approaches for treating the vertical propagation 
of wave energy and damping of reflective gravity waves from the model's 
top boundary.

   5. What is the value-added of including two-way interactive nesting
      verses one-way nesting? These tests should include both WRF cores
      using standard verification scores for all nests especially the
      coarsest parental nest to see if there is positive feedback to the
      larger scales. Answers to this question are of particular interest
      to the operational centers since in the future operational global
      and mesoscale models will be run concurrently and there is the
      choice of whether to build two-way nesting (so the mesoscale model
      can feedback into global and therefore the two models must be run
      together) or just a simple one-way coupler (which may allow more
      flexible scheduling for the operational model computations).

   6. A variety of projects focusing on advanced verification methods
      would be of interest. Some examples include the following:*/
      /*

a. Investigate verification approaches that are more appropriate for 
providing model diagnostics than many traditional approaches – that is, 
approaches that provide information about particular attributes of model 
error that can lead to a diagnosis of needed improvements in the model.*/
/*

b. Apply verification approaches that allow incorporation of 
observational uncertainty in model evaluations, and are able to express 
this uncertainty in the resulting verification measures. Demonstrate how 
this information can be separated from other sources of uncertainty 
(e.g., sampling variations) associated with estimates of verification 
measures. For example, it would be of interest to investigate the 
impacts of variations among different types of analyses (e.g., for 
precipitation) used as verification observations on variations in 
traditional and non-traditional verification measures.*/
/*

c. Apply new spatial verification methods for evaluation of ensemble 
forecasts.

d. Incorporate the time dimension in a spatial verification approach so 
that timing errors can be diagnosed, and application of this approach to 
a variety of WRF cases.

*/ /*
*//5.0 Proposal Evaluation Process*

* *The proposals submitted in response to this announcement are subject 
to both external and internal review. The external review will be 
conducted by an advisory board appointed by the DTC, which will consist 
of atmospheric scientists from government labs, operational centers, and 
academic institutions. The DTC Director, in consultation with the DTC 
Executive Committee, will make the final selections based on the review 
by the Advisory Board.

* *