Bridging Research to Operations Transitions: Status and Plans of Community GSI

Abstract

With a goal of improving operational numerical weather prediction (NWP), the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) has been working with operational centers, including, among others, the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the U.S. Air Force, to support numerical models/systems and their research, perform objective testing and evaluation of NWP methods, and facilitate research-to-operations transitions. This article introduces the first attempt of the DTC in the data assimilation area to help achieve this goal. Since 2009, the DTC, NCEP’s Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), and other developers have made significant progress in transitioning the operational Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) data assimilation system into a community-based code management framework. Currently, GSI is provided to the public with user support and is open for contributions from internal developers as well as the broader research community, following the same code transition procedures. This article introduces measures and steps taken during this community GSI effort followed by discussions of encountered challenges and issues. The purpose of this article is to promote contributions from the research community to operational data assimilation capabilities and, furthermore, to seek potential solutions to stimulate such a transition and, eventually, improve the NWP capabilities in the United States.

Offshore wind speed estimates from a high‐resolution rapidly updating numerical weather prediction model forecast dataset

“…The RAP and the HRRR use the community‐supported WRF‐ARW model, as well as the Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) for data assimilation to initialize the forecast model. The HRRR has 3‐km horizontal grid spacing, which provides several significant advantages over the coarser resolution RAP.…”

High‐Resolution Regional Reanalysis in China: Evaluation of 1 Year Period Experiments

“…In this study, the GSI analysis data assimilation developed by the Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (Purser et al, , ; Shao, Derber, et al, ; Wu, Purser, & Parrish, ) is used as the data assimilation scheme. The GSI system can assimilate many types of observations, for example, satellite radiance, and is used here to produce an analysis every 6 h by implementing a three‐dimensional variational data assimilation (3DVAR) technique.…”

Impacts of assimilating all or GOES-like AHI infrared channels radiances on QPFs over Eastern China

“…The data assimilation and forecast model used are the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) analysis system (Wu et al, 2002;Purser et al, 2003aPurser et al, , 2003b and the Advanced Research Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) (ARW) model, respectively. These systems were made publically accessible for numerical weather prediction (NWP) user community (Shao et al, 2016). Section 2 provides a brief description of AHI data characteristics, case selection and experiment design.…”

“…The AHI data assimilation experiments are carried out using the NCEP GSI system version 3.3 (Shao et al, 2016). The Community Radiative Transfer Model (CRTM) (Han et al, 2007;Weng, 2007) is employed in the GSI system as the observation operator for satellite data assimilation.…”