MESO, Inc. MM5 Real Time Forecast System Change Log



08 April 1999: Changed main grid cu scheme to Grell.
March 1999: Changed some of land use characteristics applicable to east coast.
12 February 1999: Changed land/water calculation so that final distribution is more consistent with grid scale. Land/water data is 10 min resolution, so land/water distribution on the 45 km grid is now an average of all the 10 min data points within a 45 grid box. This may affect some site forecasts along the East coast. The grid 2 land/water distribution is unchanged.
04 February 1999: Changed cape calculation to mix lowest 5 model levels (approximately lowest 50 mb) and use that for parcel, instead of using lowest level parcel as previously. Fixed bug in eta verification that affected eta wind direction statistics. Modified terrain and land/water generation software and surface characteristic fields plotting software to be more consistent with differences between mm5 dot and cross points.
15 January 1999: Altered MM5 software to eliminate noise generation on north and south nest boundaries.
28 December 1998: Added in point site tables of forecast output.
18 December 1998: Added specific soundings to web site graphics output.
14 December 1998: Changed all runs so that they use microphysics look-up table option. Seems to save about 5% in user time, but increases needed memory. Change effective with 98121500 run. Changed parallel 1-grid run from initial analysis experiment to more general experiment run. Right now that run is set to use the mixed phase microphysics scheme (vs. simple ice in the other runs).
13 December 1998: Changed eta verification to verify against obs within mm5 domain (not all obs in eta domain). Change effective with 98121300 verifications.
2 December 1998: Changed initialization for all runs to use enhanced analysis (multiquadratic option, uses raobs and METAR surface obs). Change starts in 3 December 0000 UTC runs. Added verification statistics online.
November 1998: Fixed many errors in RAWINS (used in enhanced initial analysis runs) related to modifications for incorporation of other data sets.
3 November 1998: Added in initialization of soil moisture availability and snow cover. The SMA is initialized from the Eta 12 hr forecast SMA from the previous Eta run (the 12Z run, so the 12 hr forecast SMA is valid at 00Z, the MM5 start time). The snow cover is initialized from the latest available NESDIS IMS snow cover analysis.
30 October 1998: Added Jom Bresch's modifications to MRF PBL to change soil moisture availability during the model run. Added in usage of IFSNOW option to model run to include snow cover effects during simulation. Display snow cover and soil moisture availability during run for coarse and fine grids.
29 October 1998: Added option to use AVN as first-guess when Eta is unavailable. Added explicit date/time write to main html file. Added 925 mb convergence and 1000-850 mb thickness plots to grid 2 display. Reversed color indices for RH plots so blue is moistest.
04 October 1998: Switched cu scheme in main 2-grid run from Grell to K-F. Still doing cu scheme comparison runs, so extra 1-grid run is now Grell. Rawins test run uses K-F and is compared to coarse grid of 2-grid run.
23 September 1998: Changed source of SST data to NCEP weekly 1 degree resolution data set. This data set does have Great Lake temperatures.
22 September 1998: Changed to version 2.9 of MM5v2. Switched PBL scheme from Blackadar to MRF. For the 22 September case, the changes resulted in a cpu time reduction of 11%, from 20320 secs to 18114 secs for the 2 grid 36 hr run. The reduction for the 1 grid run (with the K-F parameterization) was 15%, from 6875 secs to 5817 secs.
2 September 1998: Changed SST to September climatology (monthly climatology from Shea, Trenberth, Reynolds 2 degree monthly climatology dataset).
28 August 1998: Added in parallel coarse grid run with Kain-Fritsch cu scheme, display table to compare forecasts with Kain-Fritsch vs. Grell.
10 August 1998: Changed grid 2 topography and land use to finer scale (interpolated directly from data to 15 km grid 2, rather being interpolated from coarse grid). Changed nest start time to time 0. instead of 12 hrs into the simulation. Switched cumulus parameterization from Kain-Fritsch to Grell.
6 August 1998: Changed cumulus parameterization from Grell to Kain-Fritsch. Modified land-use to reflect data in 10 min resolution land-water data set. Moved nest a few points to the east. Added CAPE and CIN to display, added 4-panel displays, added color bar to plots. Fixed a few errors in displays.
21 June 1998: Started daily real-time MM5 runs with version 2.7. Parameterizations include simple ice, Grell cu, Blackadar PBL, cloud-scheme radiation. The coarse grid is 93*78*25 with 45 km resolution. A nest with 15 km resolution is initialized 12 hrs into the simulation. The coarse grid is initialized at 0000 UTC from the previous 12Z Eta 12 hr forecast - no additional data is used. The 12Z Eta forecasts are also used for the lateral bc.