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NOUS41 KWBC 021255
PNSWSH
Technical Implementation Notice 11-07
National Weather Service Headquarters Washington DC
755 AM EST Wed Mar 2 2011
To: Subscribers:
-Family of Services
-NOAA Weather Wire Service
-Emergency Managers Weather Information Network
-NOAAPORT
Other NWS Partners...Users and Employees
From: Timothy McClung
Science Plans Branch Chief
Office of Science and Technology
Subject: Global Forecast System (GFS) Upgrade:
Effective April 26, 2011
Effective April 26, 2011, beginning with the 1200 Coordinated
Universal Time (UTC) run, the National Centers for Environmental
Prediction (NCEP) will upgrade the Global Forecast System (GFS).
The upgrade includes:
Analysis Changes:
--Improve Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) quality control
--Remove redundant SBUV/2 total ozone
--Retune SBUV/2 ozone observation errors
--Relax AMSU-A Channel 5 quality control
--Update Community Radiative Transfer Model(CRTM) to version
2.0.2
--Include field of view size/shape/power for radiative
transfer
--Remove down weighting of collocated radiances
--Limit moisture>= 1.e-10 in each outer iteration and at
end of analysis
--Include uniform (higher resolution) thinning for satellite
radiances
--Improve location of buoys in vertical (move from 20m to
10m)
--Improve Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) code
with optimization and additional options
--Recompute background errors
--Include SBUV from NOAA-19
--Ambiguous vector quality control for ASCAT (type 290) data
Model Changes:
--Set new thermal roughness length
--Set minimum moisture value in Stratosphere to 1.0x10-7
--Reduce background diffusion in the Stratosphere
Product Changes:
-Correct error in the 192 hr, 12-hr precipitation bucket
The three model changes and the 192 hr precipitation change
listed above are designed to address shortfalls introduced with
the 27 July 2010 GFS resolution increase. The issues being
addressed are:
--Increased low level warm bias over land
--Negative temperature bias in the stratosphere
--Negative wind speed bias in the stratosphere
--Error in the calculation of the 12 hr accumulated
precipitation at 192 hrs only.
Data Availability:
The format and content of all GFS data sets will remain
unchanged. GFS data is currently available on NOAAPORT, the NWS
FTP server, the NCEP server and in NOMADS. The location of the
data will remain unchanged.
Product delivery timing of the GFS products is not expected to
change as a result of this implementation. More information
regarding the GFS and associated products can be found at:
http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/GFS/doc.php
A consistent parallel feed of data will become available on the
NCEP server once the model is running in parallel on the NCEP
Central Computing System by mid-March. The parallel data will
be available via the following URLs:
http://www.ftp.ncep.noaa.gov/data/nccf/com/gfs/para
ftp://ftp.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/data/nccf/com/gfs/para
NCEP encourages all users to ensure their decoders are flexible
and are able to adequately handle changes in content order,
changes in the scaling factor component within the product
definition section (PDS) of the GRIB files, and also any volume
changes which may be forthcoming. These elements may change with
future NCEP model implementations. NCEP will make every attempt
to alert users to these changes prior to any implementations.
For questions regarding these changes, please contact:
John Derber
NCEP/EMC, Global Climate and Weather Modeling Branch
Camp Springs, Maryland
301-763-8000 x 7740
John.Derber@xxxxxxxx
John H. Ward
NCEP/EMC, Global Climate and Weather Modeling Branch
Camp Springs, Maryland
301-763-8000 x 7185
John.Ward@xxxxxxxx
For questions regarding the dataflow aspects of these data
sets, please contact:
Rebecca Cosgrove
NCEP/NCO Dataflow Team
Camp Springs, Maryland 20746
301-763-8000 x 7198
ncep.list.pmb-dataflow@xxxxxxxx
NWS National Technical Implementation Notices are online at:
http://www.weather.gov/os/notif.htm
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