6B.4 THE NOAA HAZARDOUS WEATHER TESTBED COLLABORATIVE TESTING OF ENSEMBLE AND CONVECTION-AL.pdf

THE NOAA HAZARDOUS WEATHER TESTBED: COLLABORATIVE TESTING OF ENSEMBLE AND CONVECTION-ALLOWING WRF MODELS AND SUBSEQUENT TRANSFER TO OPERATIONS AT THE STORM PREDICTION CENTER Steven J. Weiss*1, John S. Kain2, David R. Bright1, Jason J. Levit1, Gregory W. Carbin1, Matthew E. Pyle3, Zavisa I. Janjic3, Brad S. Ferrier3, Jun Du3, Morris L. Weisman4, and Ming Xue5 1NOAA/NCEP/Storm Prediction Center, Norman, Oklahoma 2NOAA/OAR/National Severe Storms Laboratory, Norman, Oklahoma 3NOAA/NCEP/Environmental Modeling Center, Camp Springs, Maryland 4National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado 5Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma 1. INTRODUCTION NOAA’s Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) is a joint facility managed by the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL), the Storm Prediction Center (SPC), and the NWS Oklahoma City/Norman Weather Forecast Office (OUN) within the National Weather Center building on the University of Oklahoma South Research Campus. The HWT is designed to accelerate the transition of promising new meteorological insights and technologies into advances in forecasting and warning for hazardous mesoscale weather events throughout the United States. The HWT facilities include a combined forecast and research area situated between the operations areas of the SPC and OUN and a development laboratory also located nearby on the second floor. The facilities support enhanced collaboration between research scientists and operational weather forecasters on specific topics that are of mutual interest. The HWT organizational structure is composed of two primary overlapping program areas, the Experimental Forecast program (EFP) and the Experimental Warning Program (EWP) (Fig. 1). The EFP focuses on forecast-scale activities while the EWP concentrates on short-fused warnings of severe convective weather. A natural overlap exists between these two areas, par