As highlighted by the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) Science Advisory Board (SAB), an effort needs to be made to build capability and support for ensemblebased (including hybrid) data assimilation (DA) for regional applications. The SAB recommends that the DTC emphasize convective-scale NWP and ensembles, focusing on the next generation Ensemble-Variational (EnVar) DA and the challenge of using dual dynamic cores. It is also of interest to the DTC partners, including NCEP's Environmental Modeling Center and the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) to advance such a system through objective tests and evaluation. In response to this feedback, the DTC DA team proposed building capabilities and performing regional ensemble-based DA tests in the context of operational regional applications at NCEP. This work addresses future operational DA systems and complements the use of covariances from global models in current regional systems at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP).