Overview

The Hydrometeorology Testbed (HMT) has the goal of accelerating the infusion of new technologies, models, and scientific results from the research community into daily forecasting operations of the National Weather Service (NWS) and its River Forecast Centers (RFCs).   The DTC was recently invited by the HMT Management Council to explore the potential for the DTC and HMT collaborating in the four areas of common interest: forecast verification, ensemble forecasting, model physics, and data impact studies.  A set of tasks that make use of current MET capabilities to provide meaningful verification information for HMT applications have been undertaken in the first year. The goal of these tasks is to enhance forecast evaluation capabilities to meet additional DTC and HMT needs; many of them involve the HMT-West winter exercises. Funding for these tasks proceeded from the United States Weather Research Project (USWRP).

Specifically, this joint activity addresses four areas:

(1) implementation and demonstration of new verification capabilities for high resolution numerical weather prediction (NWP) forecasts,

(2) initial development of DTC capabilities for high resolution ensemble prediction,

(3) data impact studies (e.g., data denial), and

(4) evaluation of the impacts of model physics and parameterizations on NWP forecasts that are relevant to the HMT.