TAMDAR Discussion Board

upgrades to Aircraft and Soundings displays

Posted By: Bill Moninger
Date: 23-February-05 1606Z

Greetings, today we upgraded the FSL Aircraft display at http://acweb.fsl.noaa.gov/java/ and the soundings display on that page and also at http://www-frd.fsl.noaa.gov/soundings/java/ . See http://acweb.fsl.noaa.gov/java/java_change_details.html for a full discussion of these changes. The most notable changes have to do with the TAMDAR Great Lakes Fleet Experiment. First, CIMMS soundings will be available once they start being taken later today in Memphis. (The 'location' input is irrelevant for CIMMS soundings -- they are all from Memphis.) Second, soundings are now available from the RUC 'dev' and 'dev2' models. These models are identical except that dev2 ingests TAMDAR data and dev does not. (Soundings from these models load more slowly than those from 'RUC' and 'MAPS' because of the format the data are stored in.) For more information on these models, see http://ruc.fsl.noaa.gov/. Please note that some non-local TAMDAR impacts are possible, even far from any TAMDAR reports (e.g., off West coast, near southern boundary of RUC domain). Assimilation of the TAMDAR winds, in particular, can modify the always-present wind/mass imbalance, which results in some gravity wave activity in the model. These gravity waves are always present to a modest extent, even despite the use of a digital filter initialization every hour in the RUC models. The exact strength and location of the waves is different with the addition of TAMDAR data, especially its winds, and this can result in some differences in temperature and moisture far from the TAMDAR data, even to the west and south. I might mention an undocumented feature of the soundings display for those who are interested in comparing dev and dev2 for the same forecast projection: if you enter zero or a negative number in the 'hours to load' box, the absolute value of that number will be taken as the forecast projection, and you will get *only* that single sounding, valid at the indicated 'start date'. Please also note that you can overlay several soundings by holding down the shift key while you click on a sounding's button under the display. Please let me or the forum know if you encounter any problems with these displays or have questions. -Bill