Developing a local mesoscale modeling system and integrating its output into the NWS operational system

Brad Colman
NOAA/National Weather Service -- Seattle, WA

Over the past six years, Seattle's National Weather Service office has collaborated with a group of local, state, and Federal agencies to develop a real-time mesoscale numerical weather prediction system. Shared requirements and limited resources have encouraged this effort. NOAA/NWS has benefited through new training opportunities and the ongoing use of these data in the forecast process.

Challenges faced through the development include: system requirements, grid access for model initialization, timeliness of products, output dissemination and display. The variety of users demand a spectrum of model products ranging in sophistication from pre-generated graphics to gridded data in a variety of formats. Grids are currently being served in GEMPAK, VIS-5D, and netCDF, as well as the raw system format.

The National Weather Service forecast office in Seattle is currently viewing these data using the nationally deployed AWIPS system (Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System). This allows the forecasters easy access to the model output and the ability to integrate these model data with their full complement of observations and other model forecasts. The data are also being delivered to external users in VIS-5D format. The modeling system has been expanded to include: road surface models, air pollution models and a distributed hydrology model. The hydrology model (Distributed Hydrology, Soil, and Vegetation Model -- DHSVM) output has also been integrated into the real-time forecast process via locally developed GUIs.

Auditorium - Paper Tuesday - 4:30 - 5:00 P.M.