Welcome to the homepage for The Data Assimilation Testbed Center (DATC). The DATC was established within RAL's Joint Numerical Testbed in August 2006 to provide an environment for the objective testing and evaluation of state-of-the-art data assimilation techniques as applied in real-world numerical weather prediction applications. The DATC is also intended to complement the activities of the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) by providing support, testing and evaluation of the data assimilation component of the Weather and Research Forecasting (WRF) modeling system.

The current scope of the DATC includes:

• Data assimilation technique testing and evaluation (variational, ensemble, hybrid, nudging).
• Data assimilation inter-comparison (GSI, WRF-Var, ...).
• Observation System Experiments (OSEs).
• Observation System Simulation Experiments (OSSEs).
• Observation impact study.
• Observation and background error estimation and tuning.
• Data assimilation system maintenance and community support.
• NWP system, including forecast and data assimilation system, pre-release/pre-operational extended testing.
• NWP system sensitivity study (cycling vs cold-start, frequency, resolution, ...)
• Data assimilation based validation and quality control.

The scope of the DATC is evolving as new applications appear.

An illustration of the role of the DATC as a bridge between WRF DA research and operational communities.

An illustration of the role of a data assimilation system in increasing the accuracy of a forecast by keeping errors from growing. Click for full image.

 

Related Links

WRF-Var User Guide

Data Assimilation Research in MMM

The Data Assimilation Testbed Center at RAL

Want to learn more about what “Data Assimilation” is all about? View UCAR's Met Ed tutorial, “Understanding Data Assimilation: How Models Create Their Initial Conditions”.