9:00 AM Thursday July 13th to 3:30 PM Friday July 14th, 2000
Boulder, Colorado

1. Explore recent technological developments.
2. Refine scientific and operational goals.
3. Develop focused observing and modeling strategies (coordinate with other projects).
4. Decide upon the next steps.

With the PACJET field phase approaching (5 January to 18 February 2001) it is timely to take the current plan to the next level of maturity and to fully explore how PACJET can be most effective in terms of both scientific research and operational applications. This meeting will review the current status of the experiment, new observing technologies, plans for real-time modeling efforts, and pathways for data dissemination and user assessments.

This Workshop builds on forecaster and forecast-user input from an earlier PACJET workshop held in Monterey in September 1999, and on developments since then, such as the inclusion of PACJET in the U. S. Weather Research Program's data assimilation implementation plan.

Please include your

• name,
• mailing address,
• affiliation,
• phone number and
• e-mail address.

  If you wish to make a presentation, please also submit a title and summary paragraph. Although a presentation is not necessary, it could help provide background for the discussions. Roughly 10-15 min presentations are anticipated. There will be no registration fee.

  Presentations focusing on the following topics within the context of the overall PACJET objectives would be most useful. These objectives can be found in the PACJET "program document," which is posted on http://www.etl.noaa.gov/programs/pacjet/.

  • Candidate observing systems for PACJET (satellite, aircraft, ship, ground).
  • Observational and diagnostic strategies for physical process studies.
  • Linkages between weekly-to-seasonal climate variations and extreme west coast storms.
  • Numerical modeling approaches and data impa ct studies (mesoscale, global scale).
  • Communications to operations & assessment of direct data use by forecasters and others.

The following maps and directions are available at http://www.etl.noaa.gov/whatsnew/where.html:

Denver International Airport to Boulder.http://www.etl.noaa.gov/whatsnew/dia.html

US 36 to DSRC. http://www.etl.noaa.gov/whatsnew/local.html

Detailed map of Federal Site including NOAA David Skaggs Research Center (DSRC) http://www.boulder.noaa.gov/gifs/sitemap.gif

To reserve your room please call 303-444-3330; ask for reservations and indicate you are with the PACJET/ NOAA workshop. The Broker Inn is at 30th and Baseline in Boulder, which is about a 15 minute walk from NOAA, and has set aside a block of 10 rooms (all non-smoking) for the PACJET Workshop.

27 January 2000

1. Overarching goal

To develop and test methods to improve short-term (0-24 h) forecasts of damaging weather on the U. S. West Coast in landfalling winter storms emerging from the data sparse Pacific Ocean. PACJET is designed to be a next step toward attaining this goal. It is envisioned as part of a long-term effort that combines analysis, a series of focused field experiments, development of new products and tools for operational forecasting, and exploration of physical processes that contribute to the linkage between seasonal-to-interannual climate variability (e.g., ENSO) and extreme coastal weather events.

2. Time and location of PACJET

Roughly 5 January 2001 to 18 February 2001

From 300 km inland to 1000 km offshore of the U.S. West Coast from Southern California to Washington State. This covers the area between the coast and the central Pacific domain sampled by the Winter Storm Reconnaissance program.

3. Background

PACJET addresses short-term weather prediction along the US West Coast during winter, focusing on quantitative precipitation forecasting. It builds on experience gained from CALJET, an earlier west coast experiment performed during the strong El Ni�o of 1997/98. For details on CALJET see http://www7.etl.noaa.gov/programs/CALJET/index.html. CALJET aided flood forecasting, studied the utility of new observations, and explored the relationship between El Ni�o and extreme coastal storms. PACJET expands the area covered by CALJET and targets the coastal zone, which is an area of extreme societal vulnerability for which forecasts are typically less accurate than over the rest of the continent. PACJET directly links core USWRP objectives on quantitative precipitation forecasting (QPF) and optimal observing systems to this difficult but important problem.

The strategy is based on applying research techniques and technology development over several years to address specific forecast problems, such as flood warnings, high wind warnings, and marine warnings. An ongoing series of focused field experiments is envisioned over the coming years to test new instruments, data assimilation techniques and operational tools that emerge from analysis of the previous experiments, and to develop a strategy to anticipate the nature of extreme weather events linked to climate variability (e.g., ENSO).