The Developmental Testbed Center Winter Forecasting Experiment

Abstract

The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC – Nance et al. 2005) was established so the Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) research and operational communities can interact to accelerate testing and evaluation of new models and techniques for research applications and operational implementation. One method of testing and evaluation employed by the DTC is real-time forecast experiments, such as the DTC Winter Forecast Experiment (DWFE), which ran from January to March 2005. DWFE was designed in close consultation with operational forecasters, researchers, and DTC staff, and was motivated by the needs of the National Weather Service (NWS) for improved model guidance to support their winter weather forecast and warning mission. The objectives of DWFE were to: • provide experimental model guidance for winter weather forecasting over a large domain using two variants of the Weather Research Forecast (WRF) model with explicit convection only (no convective parameterization scheme), • expose forecasters to the nature and behavior of the WRF model at very high resolution prior to the first scheduled operational implementation at NCEP, • determine whether encouraging results seen earlier from 4-km WRF runs in the warm season provide forecast value during the winter for lead times out to 48 h, and • identify the forecast value of small-scale flow features resolved by the high-resolution grids.