Introduction to the NCEP Very Short Range Ensemble Forecast System (VSREF)

摘要

The NCEP Very Short Range Ensemble Forecast (VSREF) System is specially developed for aviation weather and potential NextGen applications. Its development was initiated in 2009. The VSREF system is based on NCEP's operational Rapid Update Cycle (RUC) and North American Mesoscale (NAM) model runs using a time-lag ensembling technique. The current domain is over the contiguous US (CONUS). The VSREF is routinely updated every hour with hourly output through 6 hr forecast length. In the current developing stage, there are 11 aviation-weather related probabilistic products in the VSREF system, including icing, clear air turbulence (CAT), visibility, fog, ceiling, low level wind shear, jet stream, surface wind gust, simulated reflectivity, convection, and freezing height. There is an experimental web page to display these products for demonstration. In this paper, more detailed information about the NCEP VSREF including its system configuration, product generation, verification and future plan will be described.