Transcript ConsortiumDec2013New2.ppt

Northwest Modeling Consortium
December 3, 2013
Changes in Modeling System
• 9/16/2013 Started using the Noah Land
Surface Model and have begun using the
RRTMG (newer Rapid Radiative Transfer
Model) longwave and shortwave schemes.
– Better radiative accuracy
– Better dew points at surface
– Better surface energy budget
– Snow will change dynamically during
forecasts
Increasing Snow With NOAA LSM
Did not degrade other variables!
Changes to modeling system
• 11/09/2013 Switched to using MODIS
land-use for the real-time with the
2013110900 forecast.
– Much better description of surface land use.
– Improves forecasts at several locations,
particularly surface temperature
Current Land
Use (USGS)
MODIS
Land
Use
Big Improvements at Some
Stations with MODIS Landuse
July
August
Multiyear
USGS
MODIS
USGS
MODIS
Another Model Verification:
Windwatch
You can see our model tests
online
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~ovens/windbias/
New Hardware
• New uninterruptable power supplies
• Additional hard disks.
New Computers Needed
• SAGE, our main cluster, is 3-4 years old. Like to
replace hardware at 5 years for reliability
• With our recent software upgrade, we are now
nearly using the entire resource: very little
wiggle room left.
• Also, the recent upgrades have slowed down the
runs…particularly, the 1.3 km
• If we are to continue improving the system, or to
get availability of 1.3 km sooner, we will need
refreshed hardware.
New Computers Needed
• The good news is that prices/performance
has continued to improve over the past
few years.
• $52K will get us a system roughly twice as
fast as the current one.
• $85K will secure a system 3.3 times faster.
• I have hard quotes for these
enhancements.
Mark Albright has created realtime ACARS data plots
• ACARS is weather data (mainly
temperature/wind) on wide body planes
arriving at major airports (SeaTac,
Portland, etc.)
• Provides soundings as planes approach or
take off.
• Mark’s software combines multiple flights
to get time-height sections at several
locations and on the UW atmos web page.
An Example
Keep this in the family!
• Technically, not supposed to make it
public.
• Could make other products: like
soundings
• Only available for major airports
• Poor availability in middle of night (1-5am)
Now getting TAMDAR data from
AIRDAT/Panasonic: Commuter
and Short Haul Aircraft
New Tests and Tasks
•
•
•
•
Problem: too rapid burn-off of low clouds
Problem: lack of low clouds
Problem: too much mixing at low levels
Problem: loss of saturation for shallow
layers near the surface
• The problems are all interrelated. Now we
have optimized the rest of the system,
time to return to this age-old problem.
Example: October 2013 fog/stratus
case
October fog/stratus case
Causes and potential fixes
• Lack of vertical resolution: tried adding 10
more levels, helps marginally.
• Lack of moisture initialization either from
observations or previous runs. Helped in the
old MM5 runs, trying to build capability in WRF.
• Too much numerical diffusion. Now
experimenting with no diffusion.
• Surface exchange problems. Added NOAA
LSM
• PBL parameterization issues. Try various
schemes. Have done that.
Current System
No Diffusion
Current and No Diffusion: UIL
WRF
Bufkit
Output
BUFKIT
• Some folks are interested in converting out
WRF output to BUFKIT format.
• Dave Ovens has spent several days on
this.
• So far, frustrating results.
• He can probably get this done, but will
take 2-4 man weeks to get a reliable
product. Enough consortium demand?
Microsoft Project
• Our department will be beginning a major
effort with Microsoft to build a nextgeneration weather prediction effort.
• A major thrust will be the post-processing
of global model output.
• As a result, we will be gaining real-time
access to ECMWF grids.
• These could be used for ensembles or the
deterministic real time WRF if we wanted
to wait to start each run.
The End