Welcome

Welcome to the RTMA/URMA VLab community!

The purpose of this community is to facilitate feedback and discussion on the RTMA/URMA system. 

Meeting notes are available under the Google Drive Folder linked above.

To learn more about our next upgrade, see the asset publication below.

Use the System Overview to learn more about the system in general.

Use the forum to ask questions about the system and join the discussion with other users and the development team. 

Note that there are two forums: one for precipitation issues and one for all other variables.

You can post to the precip issues forum by sending an email to qpe.rtma.urma.feedback.vlab@noaa.gov.  For all other issues, you can post by sending an email to rtma.feedback.vlab@noaa.gov.  Please note that you must have a user account to post to the forum.  If you do not have an account, please contact matthew.t.morris@noaa.gov.

We recently added the ability for NWS Regional or WFO personnel to request that stations be removed from the analysis.  To access this, click on the "Station Reject Lists and Requests" tab.

There has been recent interest in knowing exact station locations, especially those of METAR sites.  Our METAR information table is under the "METAR Location Info" tab.

Users may also be interested in the National Blend of Models VLab community.

We appreciate any feedback on how this page or community could be improved.  You can submit such feedback via the above email handle or forum.

 

What's New

December 2017 Implementation Summary

Document

Overview of upgrade scheduled for December 2017. Note that this was originally scheduled for October 2017, but has been pushed back due to technical issues.

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More Details
Modified Date
10/31/17

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Re: Official RTMA/URMA 2.8 Evaluation Site

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Dan Baumgardt, modified 5 Years ago.

Re: Official RTMA/URMA 2.8 Evaluation Site

Youngling Posts: 2 Join Date: 9/24/12 Recent Posts
As usual, I am late to this party. BUT, the entire blacklist issue gives me fits.

Observations vary in quality on different timescales. Some are always great, some are down for weeks, some are bad for a few hours,  some are bad at sunrise, some are down a day or two.

The quality is dependent on hardware, meta sighting, repair priority, or weather pattern. 

OBS_QC provides an interface for every WFO to provide daily QC of the observation network BY VARIABLE and HOUR.  

Why cant we harvest this flat file for 122 WFOs once per day and ingest it into the URMA/RTMA QC? 

Dan Baumgardt, M.S.
Science and Operations Officer

National Weather Service
N2788 County Road FA
La Crosse, Wisconsin, 54601
P: 608-784-8275 x766
weather.gov/lacrosse    Facebook

Building a Weather Ready Nation



On Sat, Nov 2, 2019 at 8:22 PM Mel Nordquist - NOAA Federal <mel.nordquist@noaa.gov> wrote:
Jeff,

I am sure Portland will likely pipe in on this at some point. I am not sure what the meteorological situation was on the morning of the 29th of Oct. 

I did grow up in East Vancouver, right across the river from the airport. I do know that we would often get wind blowing down the Columbia River Gorge that would be restricted to areas of east Portland and Vancouver along the river. This may be one of those cases. Like I said I was not paying attention to what was going on up there as we were pretty busy with our own wind events down here in northern CA at that time. 

One of the concerns I have always had in general terms with respect to "neighbor checks" is exactly this sort of thing where the obs may be correct and there is a micro scale phenomena that is being represented accurately. Again, I can't say for sure but I have seen that kind of event there before. These cases usually occur in January though and October seems a bit strange to me from a climo point of view.

Just my two cents, will be interested to hear from Portland.

Mel

On Sat, Nov 2, 2019 at 8:14 AM Jeffrey Craven - NOAA Federal <jeffrey.craven@noaa.gov> wrote:
OK, one more plea about blacklisting observations, and how the local expertise from the WFOs is absolutely critical in our success with RTMA/URMA and NBM.  

I was looking at the RTMA Parallel at wind speeds and I see some areas with significant improvement.  Others haven't changed much.  I don't mean to pick on anyone in particular, but I found a good example of what EMC is up against in trying to do a good, thorough, scientific analysis.  

So here is an example from Portland OR area at 14z on Oct 29th.  The sustained wind at KPDX was 29 knots (33 mph) on the METAR.

image.png
  
The background first guess was around 5 knots, and the final URMA Parallel analysis doubled the value to about 10 knots.  

image.png

I looked at the observations available to URMA at 14z, and 21 of them in the area that were accepted were below 10 knots.    11 of those 21 observations were actually Below 5 knots.  So the fact that URMA doubled the first guess is actually impressive.

The airport is a major outlier in this case, AND it is also on outlier to the first guess from HRRR.  So the reasonable analysis was provided given the mathematics behind the situation.   

image.png

BOTTOM Line:  We need the local expertise to blacklist observations that aren't representative.   

The other issue is are METAR sites actually representative of large areas?  Are these sites below 10 knots actually bad observations?  If they are, they must be blacklisted because being able to analyze anything close to 29 knots near KPDX in this example is not very scientific given the data.  

Some things to think about.  I truly believe that we should attempt to analyze to METARs within about 3F or 3 knots if at all possible, but I really don't see how we justify that based on seeing similar examples literally all over the country day after day.   I am asking AFS if we can have a virtual workshop to discuss these matters with forecasters and modelers and come up with a compromise.  But it will be a compromise, because METARs and other observations can be outliers and do not represent the whole 2.5km grid point.  They may be representative of the airport on the scale of a couple hundred meters and that is about it.  

JPC

Jeff Craven
Chief, Statistical Modeling Division (SMD)
National Weather Service, W/STI-12
Meteorological Development Laboratory (MDL)
Room 10410, SSMC2
Silver Spring, MD 20910
(301) 427-9475 office
(816) 506-9783 cell/text
@jpcstorm


On Sat, Nov 2, 2019 at 10:29 AM Jeffrey Craven - NOAA Federal <jeffrey.craven@noaa.gov> wrote:
The upgraded RTMA/URMA is slated for about March 2020.   There is an official evaluation site which is one-stop shopping for a variety of information, forums, and ways to provide feedback.  

There is plenty of information available on evaluating and providing feedback.  Improvements in RTMA/URMA almost automatically mean improvements in NBM performance.  

https://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/users/meg/rtma_urma_v2p8/  

JPC

Jeff Craven
Chief, Statistical Modeling Division (SMD)
National Weather Service, W/STI-12
Meteorological Development Laboratory (MDL)
Room 10410, SSMC2
Silver Spring, MD 20910
(301) 427-9475 office
(816) 506-9783 cell/text
@jpcstorm


--
Mel K. Nordquist,
Science and Operations Officer
National Weather Service
WFO Eureka CA
(707)443-0574x224

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Bookmarks

  • 2011 RTMA Paper (Weather and Forecasting)

    The most recent peer-reviewed paper on the RTMA. Published in Weather and Forecasting in 2011.
    7 Visits

  • Public RTMA/URMA Viewer

    Another viewer of the current RTMA/URMA, with an archive going back 24 hours. This version is open to the public, but does not contain information about the (many) restricted obs used.
    54 Visits

  • RAP downscaling conference preprint (23rd IIPS)

    This link is to a presentation from the (then) RUC group on how the downscaling process works. Although we now use the RAP, HRRR, and NAM, the logic of the downscaling code is mostly unchanged from this point.
    2 Visits