Daniel B. Weber

Some Practical Considerations Regarding Horizontal Resolution in the First Generation of Operational Convection-Allowing NWP

Abstract During the 2005 NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed Spring Experiment two different high-resolution configurations of the Weather Research and Forecasting-Advanced Research WRF (WRF-ARW) model were used to produce 30-h forecasts 5 days a week for a total of 7 weeks. These configurations used the same physical parameterizations and the same input dataset for the initial and boundary conditions, differing primarily in their spatial resolution. The first set of runs used 4-km horizontal grid spacing with 35 vertical levels while the second used 2-km grid spacing and 51 vertical levels. Output from these daily forecasts is analyzed to assess the numerical forecast sensitivity to spatial resolution in the upper end of the convection-allowing range of grid spacing. The focus is on the central United States and the time period 18–30 h after model initialization. The analysis is based on a combination of visual comparison, systematic subjective verification conducted during the Spring Experiment, and objectiv...

Service-Oriented Environments for Dynamically Interacting with Mesoscale Weather

Within a decade after John von Neumann and colleagues conducted the first experimental weather forecast on the ENIAC computer in the late 1940s, numerical models of the atmosphere become the foundation of modern-day weather forecasting and one of the driving application areas in computer science. This article describes research that is enabling a major shift toward dynamically adaptive responses to rapidly changing environmental conditions.