EMC Synergy Meeting Highlights July 26 2004

 

This meeting was led by Peter Manousos and was attended by Geoff Dimego, Pete Caplan, Dave Plummer, John Ward, Kevin McCarthy, Bull Bua, Larry Burroughs, Keith Brill, and Steve Jascourt.

 

1. CCS

John Ward reported that contract negotiations for the new system are complete and the Phase II equipment is in Gaithersburg.  At the same time the equipment for the backup site in Fairmont, VA has arrived and will be unloaded.  “Acceptance” testing for the Gaithersburg system should be started in the next 2 weeks.  Access to the machine will be allowed after a 30 day period (estimated September 15th).  A moratorium on the current system will begin September 21st (coincident with WRF ensemble start) and should end January 15, 2005. During the moratorium, products added in new AWIPS builds will not be effected as long as they are already produced by NCEP.

 

2. Notes from EMC

a. Global Modeling Group: Pete Caplan reported that the Grid Scale Statistical Interpolation (GSI) Data Assimilation System is not yet into parallel production. The coupled atmosphere-ocean climate model which has been testing for quite a while will be officially implemented with a major publicity event on August 24.

 

b. Mesoscale Modeling Group: Geoff Dimego reported that some of the components for the final Eta bundle (details in last synergy meeting highlight notes of 6/07/2004) are still being worked on, so the bundle will be prepared for parallel testing by the moratorium date and implemented not until after the moratorium. The WRF Ensemble output (details in the last synergy meeting highlights of 6/07/2004) will not include spaghetti and probabilistic outputs due to the limited membership.  BUFR soundings are still intended to be generated from the WRF.

 

c. Global Ensemble Prediction System: No report.

 

d. Short Range Ensemble Prediction System: Geoff Dimego reported that he is briefing the NCEP Director today for August 10 implementation of the 32-km SREF with enhanced physics diversity and rescaled perturbation.

 


e. Marine Modeling and Analysis Branch (MMAB): Larry Burroughs reported AWC is interested in accessing surface visibility at .5 degree resolution.  Job implementation forms have been submitted for sending northern hemispheric vessel icing and visibility fields to AWIPS. Also COFS has recently improved its data assimilation system with good results.

 

3.  Miscellaneous

HPC inquired on behalf of AWC the status of an AWC request to lower the upper bound for the calculation of the maximum wind level from 70 mb to 100 mb.  Pete Caplan requested to forward the AWC inquiry to Hua Lu Pan.  HPC inquired on behalf of Southern Region SSD the possibility of quantifying the impact of additional upper air data being ingested by the models due to North American Monsoon Experiment (NAME).  EMC responded that CPC has already been tasked as part of NAME to conduct and compare statistics between reruns of the model (Eta 32 km using either EDAS or RDAS) with and without NAME data.  HPC also inquired to EMC and NCO to check on the status of BUFR output being available to 84 hours as the data is still only available to 60 hours. This output will be issued as soon as possible, but a 90-day change notification might be required.

 

4. Next Meeting Monday August 30th, 2004 at noon in room 209.