The developmental testbed center and its winter forecasting experiment

The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) was formed to promote exchanges between the development and operational communities in the field of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP). The WRF DTC serves to accelerate the transfer of NWP technology from research to operations and to support a subset of the current WRF operational configurations to the general community. This article describes the mission and recent activities of the WRF DTC, including a detailed discussion about one of its recent projects, the WRF DTC Winter Forecasting Experiment (DWFE). DWFE was planned and executed by the WRF DTC in collaboration with forecasters and model developers. The real-time phase of the experiment took place in the winter of 2004/05, with two dynamic cores of the WRF model being run once per day out to 48 h. The models were configured with 5-km grid spacing over the entire continental United States to ascertain the value of high-resolution numerical guidance for winter weather prediction. Forecasts were distributed to many National Weather Service Weather Forecast Offices to allow forecasters both to familiarize themselves with WRF capabilities prior to WRF becoming operational at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) in the North American Mesoscale Model (NAM) application, and to provide feedback about the model to its developers. This paper presents the experiment's configuration, the results of objective forecast verification, including uncertainty measures, a case study to illustrate the potential use of DWFE products in the forecasting process, and a discussion about the importance and challenges of real-time experiments involving forecaster participation.