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ABOUT CAPS CAPS's mission is to develop and demonstrate techniques for the numerical analysis and prediction of high-impact local weather and environmental conditions, with emphasis on the assimilation of observations from Doppler radars and other advanced in-situ and remote sensing systems. CAPS conducts a broad-based program of basic and applied storm-scale research, and its award-winning Advanced Regional Prediction System (ARPS) is used worldwide. CAPS wants to be the world leader in convective-scale data assimilation and numerical weather prediction, providing a venue for exploring bold new ideas, attracting the best scientists and students, and facilitating the transfer of knowledge and technology to academia, government and industry. NEWS CAPS Spring Forecast Experiment for HWT and VORTEX-2. 5/2009. CAPS is making history again. It is producing 1-km-resolution continental-US-scale realtime weather predictions, and 20-member 4-km-resolution multi-model (WRF-ARW, WRF-NMM and ARPS) ensemble forecasts for the same domain, assimilating data from over 120 WSR-88D radars using the ARPS 3DVAR and cloud analysis system. These forecasts are run in support for the VORTEX-2 field experiment and are evaluated at the NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) 2009 Spring Experiment and is a collaboration among CAPS, SPC, and NSSL. Xue et al. (2008) and Kong et al. (2008) describe the 2008 experiments. This project is primaryly supported by a NOAA CSTAR grant and NSF grant ATM-0802888. The 4-km ensemble forecasts are run at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (Bigben) using about 2000 processor cores while the 1-km forecasts at the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) at the University of Tennessee (Kraken) using about 10,000 processor cores. The runs take 5 to 8 hours to complete overnight. The above 30-hour forecasts starting from 0000 UTC (7pm CDT) are usually available on weekdays only. Additional 18-hour-long forecasts from 1200 UTC are run daily using OU OSCER Supercomputer (Sooner) at 4 km resolution for a smaller domain, in support for the VORTEX-2. Xue et al. (2009) describes a 1-km test case using the realtime 1-km forecast configurations, and comparison between 1 and 4 km forecasts. The following two papers describe the configurations and preliminary analysis results of the CAPS 2009 spring forecasts. Xue, M., F. Kong, K. W. Thomas, J. Gao, Y. Wang, K. Brewster, K. K. Droegemeier, X. Wang, J. Kain, S. Weiss, D. Bright, M. Coniglio, and J. Du, 2009: CAPS realtime multi-model convection-allowing ensemble and 1-km convection-resolving forecasts for the NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed 2009 Spring Experiment. 23nd Conf. Wea. Anal. Forecasting/19th Conf. Num. Wea. Pred., Omaha, NB, Amer. Meteor. Soc., Paper 16A.2. Xue, M., F. Kong, K. W. Thomas, J. Gao, Y. Wang, K. Brewster, K. K. Droegemeier, J. Kain, S. Weiss, D. Bright, M. Coniglio, and J. Du, 2009: A realtime storm-scale ensemble forecast system: 2009 spring experiment. 23nd Conf. Wea. Anal. Forecasting/19th Conf. Num. Wea. Pred., Omaha, NB, Amer. Meteor. Soc., Paper 16A.3. Additional details on the forecast experiment can be found in the 2009 CAPS Spring Forecast Experiment Plan. CAPS Realtime Wind Analyses and On-demand Forecasts for CASA 5/2009. CAPS is producing 1-km horizontal resolution dynamic on-demand forecasts in support of the CASA spring experiment. ARPS 3DVAR is used to assimilate CASA radar and WSR-88D radar data, when storms exist within the CASA network. In adidtion, realtime 400-m resolution low-level wind analyses are also produced every 5 minutes. Realtime CASA radar display is at SOCC. These forecasts and analyses use a supercomputer at OSCER. CASA is an NSF Engineering Research Center.
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