June 2017 work log

Activities for week of June 12, 2017

• WRF Workshop all week
• Starting work on Observations/OBSPROC talk
  
  • Combined with user question, this inspired me to finish major update of LITTLE_R help page http://www2.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/wrfda/OnlineTutorial/Help/littler.html
  • Now contains detailed information on which fields are mandatory/optional for each observation type
• WRFHELP emails
  • Helped user from Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, India, with WRFPLUS compilation problem
    

Activities for week of June 19, 2017

• PTO Tuesday morning
• Regtest
  
  • Starting work on a new regression test to cover uncovered capabilities:
    • GENBE CV6
    • GPSRO in bufr format
    • SSMIS radiance
      • Discovered that there are not radiance_info files for DMSP-17 and 18, just 16. Will copy the existing file to cover 17 and 18 since the instrument is identical
• Still working on obs talk
• WEB
  • Finished up some details on new LITTLE_R page
  • Added landing page for downloading PREPBUFR2LITTLER converter: 
• WRFHELP emails
  • Answered email from Gerard Hesselmans (Netherlands govt) about humidity observations being silently rejected
  • Helping user from NC State running cycling system on Yellowstone

Activities for week of June 26, 2017

• PTO Friday
• Tested different GEN_BE BIN_TYPE options since they have never been tested before. They all work, and all produce different results, so I'll call that a pass.
• Finished up testing new GEN_BE option for missing input data
• Regtest
  • Continuing work on new regression test; running into problem with DMSP data
• Finally finished obs talk, moving on to verification talk.
• WRFHELP emails
  • Helped user from Wuhan university in assimilating GPSZTD obs
  • Replied to user trying to use WMO BUFR SEVIRI files
  • User from NC State was using restart files instead of output which caused the WRFDA failure...the error occurs way later in the executable than it should have!
  • Replied to user from Georgia Tech regarding a few different topics:
    • running into error with cu_physics=6 (Tiedke scheme) for 4DVAR; advised them to switch to cu_physics=1 since impact should be small and error may be hard to solve
    • Helped using length and variance scaling parameters for cloud_cv options
  • Replied to user form Scripps Institution of Oceanography (University of California, San Diego) asking for advice about different BIN_TYPE options in WRFDA
• WEB
  • Minor fixes to LITTLE_R help page and PREPBUFR2LITTLER converter