NCEP Modeling Synergy Meeting Highlights: October 30, 2006

This meeting was led by Peter Manousos and attended by Geoff Dimego, Jim Hoke, Dave Plummer, John Ward, Mary Hart, Keith Brill, Bill Bua, and Ed Danaher. SPC’s Steve Weiss and Gregory Grosshans, and UCAR/COMET’s Stephen Jascourt attended by remote conference.

1. CCS

John Ward reported the CCS upgrade continues and the moratorium is slated to end mid- January 2007. Recent high- impact issues relating to data access and processing efficiency (speed) have been overcome. The new configuration of the CCS will be “Dew” (primary operational “production” system located in Fairmont, WV, replacing “White”), “Mist” (development system and operational “hot spare”/backup located in Gaithersburg, MD, replacing “Blue”), and “Haze” (NOAA Research and Development system located in Gaithersburg, MD, replacing “Aqua”). Note - Blue and White will be decommissioned on Jan 24^th 2007, the archive “HPSS” system will reside on Haze, and all “r” commands (rcp, rsh) on Mist and Dew will be replaced by “scp and ssh” by the end of November 2006.

2. NOTES FROM EMC

2a. Global Modeling Branch:

Geoff Dimego reported that sometime in the 2^nd quarter, perhaps not until March, the SSI analysis will be replaced by GSI and the vertical coordinate system will be changed to a sigma-p hybrid. Four parallels are running to iron out issues about the balance constraint and external mode in the analysis, among other things.

2b. Mesoscale Modeling Branch:

Geoff Dimego reported lots of work on solving problems with the NAM forecasts. The NAMX parallel is focusing on damping the external mode to improve balance and reduce incorrect adjustment away from the analysis state. The NAMY parallel is testing changes in shallow and deep convection, divergence damping, and diffusion. Work is ongoing to reformulate the horizontal diffusion to be effectively calculated on isobaric surfaces instead of sigma surfaces so that restricting its application in areas of steep terrain slope would not be necessary – a physically more sound and more universal fix than some of the summer crisis changes. Work is also being done to adopt the global model formulation for form drag and momentum drag, which are absent in the NMM. The Eta had form drag based on subgrid-scale terrain variance and wind direction, but NMM only had a simple dependence on terrain variance which was ultimately removed in the NAM WRF-NMM because it was causing near-surface winds to be too light over mountainous terrain. It is hoped that the global model treatment will improve trough speed and depth because mountain wave momentum drag had that effect in the global model. Also, new datasets need to be tested for implementation, including AIRS and MODIS data, along with an increase in the vertical resolution of the radiative transfer solver inside the assimilation.

2c. Global Ensemble Prediction System:

Nothing new to report. The Ensemble Users Workshop takes place this week.

2d. Short Range Ensemble Prediction System:

Post moratorium upgrades will focus on bias corrected output (late spring 2007) and upgrading WRF members to the most current version of the WRF (including running them at a horizontal resolution finer than 40km). Eventually a transition of all membership to WRF will occur in 2008-2009. SREF ensemble output (mean/spread, probability) are already being sent over the SBN and ingest is part of AWIPS OB7.2.

2e. Marine Modeling and Analysis Branch (MMAB):

Nothing new to report.

3. The next meeting will be held Monday January 29 at noon in EMC Rm 209 with remote conference capability.