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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 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 Oakridge National Lab./NICS (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. More details can be found in the 2009 CAPS Spring Forecast Experiment Plan. 5/2009. CAPS is producing daily 6-hour forecasts at 1-km horizontal resolution using ARPS 3DVAR and ARPS, assimilating WSR-88D and/or CASA radar data, on days storms exist within the CASA network. 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. This is a project of CASA, an NSF Engineering Research Center.
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