The meeting in progress.

ESRL, HPC, and DTC Participate in Collaborative Meeting on HMT

Personnel from the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) Physical Sciences Division and Global Systems Division, the NOAA-NCEP Hydrologic Prediction Center (HPC) Development and Training Branch, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) attended a collaborative meeting on the Hydrometeorology Testbed (HMT) at the David Skaggs Research Center in Boulder, CO, 27-28 January 2010. Participants briefed each other on current activities and participated in productive discussions resulting in plans to further collaborate on a number of concrete activities that build on past and ongoing efforts.

ESRL and HPC plan to collaborate on the application of new performance measures for extreme quantitative precipitation forecasts (QPF). In addition, experts on object-oriented verification were consulted in order to begin laying a foundation to explore new verification techniques of QPF. These new object-oriented techniques will be compared to more traditional verification measures to assess their impact on assessing QPF performance. The ESRL and HPC collaboration will also focus on atmospheric rivers (ARs) and explore tools that can be utilized by HPC forecasters to understand and ultimately predict these drivers of extreme precipitation on the West Coast. In the near term, the next steps of this collaboration include sharing data and having a follow-on meeting in May 2010 to be held in conjunction with the NOAA Testbed Workshop.