DATC Projects
The DATC was initiated as a joint collaboration between NCAR and the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA) in 2006. Since then, the DATC has become an international effort supported by AFWA, NCAR's Antarctic Mesoscale Predictions System (AMPS), the Korean Meteorological Administration (KMA) and Taiwan Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA). Testbeds have been built to test and evaluation data assimilation components in various applications.
AFWA Testbed
Given its unique mission, AFWA focuses on high-resolution, multi-theater and worldwide numerical weather predications. One emphasis of the DATC is to ensure AFWA's data assimilation and forecasting systems are thoroughly tested to match its unique set of requirements. In various domains, the DATC is conducting an extensive series of experiments to evaluate alternative data assimilation techniques (e.g. WRF-Var, GSI, Hybrid Ensember/Var, etc.) and forecast impacts of various observations (e.g. radio occultation observations, radiance data, etc.).
AMPS Testbed
The Antarctic Mesoscale Prediction System (AMPS) is an experimental, real-time, high-resolution numerical weather prediction capability for the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). It includes the WRF-ARW dynamic solver and the three-dimensional WRF-Var data assimilation (DA) system. The system is running in real-time at NCAR/MMM. The major goal of the DATC AMPS Testbed is to support data assimilation efforts in this system. The current work is as follows: (a) keeping the AMPS DA system up to date; (b) tuning the background error covariances for AMPS; and (c) evaluating and, therefore, ingesting of new satellite observations into AMPS.
The Taiwanese Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) Testbed is a pre-operational test-rig to evaluate the CAA WRF-ARW and WRF-Var system in Pacific applications. Major work includes studies of radio-occultation data impacts, radiance data assimilation tuning, and radiance data impacts on typhoon forecasts, etc. > more
KMA Testbed
The Korean Meteorological Administration (KMA) Testbed features embedded domains with10-km and 3.3-km horizontal resolutions. The major focus of the DATC work is to test the capabilities of the KMA WRF-ARW and WRF-Var system in extended runs, investigate high-impact weather DA (e.g., radar DA), and conduct DA configuration tuning (resolution, cycling vs cold-start mode of the system).
Indian Domain Testbed
The Indian Domain Testbed explores the use of WRF NMM dynamic solver with both the NCEP's operational GSI data assimilation system and the NCAR's WRF-Var data assimilation system for the forecast of tropical cycling track and intensity over Bay of Bengal.
