EMC/HPC/MPC/NCO/CPC synergy meeting highlights 08/27/01

This meeting was led by Peter Manousos and followed a generic agenda denoted by the subtitles below. Attendees included Geoff Dimego, Hua-Lu Pan, Steve Tracton, Jun-Du, John Ward, Mike Bodner, Jim Hoke, Kevin McCarthy, Dave Reynolds, Ed Danaher, Keith Brill, Brett McDonald and Steve Jascourt.

1. IBM SP

John Ward reported that System A is stable and the climate nodes have been installed (there are no climate nodes on System B). The climate model runs for most of the day over a 30 day period to produce the monthly suite of climate products. Since there is some slush time available each day for catching up if System A experiences down time, the climate products can still delivered on schedule unless the down time occurs near the end of the monthly period. The climate nodes are running in parallel for the next 2 weeks and are slated to be declared operational starting Oct 5 with the first operational forecast completing one month later. The first forecasts from the climate model are not expected until Dec 6th. A NOAA press release at the end of September will state that this model is running in a Real Time Test and Evaluation Mode. Also, OSO communications lines (from Bowie to OSO) are being upgraded to 155 Mbit/s and will be ready by early September. Improvement will be an 30x increase in transmission speed. Finally, the 12km Eta and the 20km RUC codes begin in parallel on system A by mid September. This will result in NO extra nodes for development on System A. If there is a problem running these 2 at the same time, the Eta will receive priority.

2. Notes from EMC

a. Global Modeling Group: Hua-Lu reported that the global model will be running a T254 64-layer parallel as soon as the background error statistics for the analysis can be generated. Also, there were plans to pack more sigma layers at jet/tropopause level. However CFL violations resulted in vertical advection terms over the Himalayas, where the sigma layers became extremely thin, so the layer distribution is being redesigned.

The AVN/MRF suite being collapsed to 4x/day is targeted to coincide with the T254 implementation before the beginning of next hurricane season.

b. Mesoscale Modeling Group: Geoff Dimego reported that the 12km parallel tests are scheduled to begin in mid September although experimental runs are currently being produced (output available at http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/mmb/mmbpll/etapllsup12/ ). Cold-season retrospective runs covering the same period as tested for the July model bundle will be performed and shipped to Western Region to assist with their spin-up on familiarity with the 12-km model in preparation for the 2002 Winter Olympics. The full bundle to the Eta is slated for implementation in November. Changes from the current operational Eta include increasing horizontal resolution to 12km, vertical resolution to 70 levels, and tweaking the 3DVar scheme to incorporate NOAA-16 radiances. A planned modification to the grid-scale precipitation scheme will include the ability to vary fall speed by 5 precipitation species (as opposed to the current package which no ability to discern different species). The current scheme was developed for an 80km horizontal grid and is now being applied at a 22km grid, contributing to the frequent bulls eyes in QPF fields from this model. The radiation changes are turning out to be more difficult and might not be ready in time for the November bundle.

Plans for running the off time runs out to 60 or possibly even 84 hours were discussed. Output grids for the 12 km model were discussed, with HPC preferring replacing 20km grids (215) with a new 12km grid (218) rather than using the 10-km nests as tiles. The problem is that NAWIPS has a 97,000 grid point size limit, which the 12-km grid exceeds but the existing regional 10-km grids fit into. It will be roughly ten months before a new version of NAWIPS with large enough array limits is made available despite this being a problem of long standing which Brett McDonald fixed in his own NAWIPS version for dealing with QPF verification data.

c. Short range ensembles (SREF): Steve Tracton reported that the SREF group is working with HPC- supplied requirements to support the HPC winter weather experiment. Also, SREF output will be supplied on 104 and 216 grids for the west coast and AK. FSL will provide 5 RUC members at 48 km resolution over the Eta domain once per day, to be evaluated for possible inclusion into SREF. The same holds true for 5 members of the ETA with the Kain-Fritsch convective scheme.

d. Global ensembles : Zoltan Toth reported that Dick Wobus will be running a parallel version of the Global Ensembles once per day with 10 members and at T126 resolution out to 7.5 days. This includes a hurricane relocation algorithm (structure is perturbed, but not position) and the breeding cycle presently rescaled to 24 hours is being rescaled to 6 hours, corresponding to the 6 hours of error growth in the analysis (GDAS first guess=6 hour forecast). These are planned to be run with the 4x/day collapsed AVN/MRF suite next spring. A letter from Ralph Petersen will be disseminated to all NCEP centers asking to ID a representative to help formulate requirements for the global ensemble products and also to help identify which products from the ECMWF ensemble and high resolution control would be most useful, now that NCEP has permission to use these fields in operational practice.

3. Input to EMC from Operational Centers - Dave Reynolds had inquired about running the offtime Eta runs to at least 60 hours and HPC inquired on the bulls eye's in the Eta QPF (see 2b above).

4. Next Meeting Proposed Monday September 24th at noon in room 209.