We started a discussion forum for the two NWP models used at NCEP, the GFS and the NAM-WRF. At first, there was a fair amount of activity, but the forum didn't take long to go into hiatus. It seemed that when there was a new GFS or NAM-WRF model implementation, activity would be strong. But once the NWS Forecast Offices got used to the new version of the model, activity would die. This was true even if interesting things about model performance were brought up by me or the other member of the NWP Training Team. We've stopped maintaining the NWP Discussion Forum for now.
Hi Bill. It seems like this forum for NWP discussions is a special case of instructional discussion forums. You used it for ongoing professional community discussion. I suspect there were a lot of factors contributing to their eventual fading each time, but it seems they served a good purpose at the introduction of a new model, when doubt was the highest. Since the forum wasn't for a course, I'm wondering if you could say a little bit about the role you saw for yourself in for the forum, and what type of discussions were generated, when they were.
We had hoped that the NWS (and other) meteorologists would use it to ask questions or make comments about any unusual performance issues with the NWP models and the ensemble forecast systems, above and beyond model changes. Stephen and I would have responded to these and hopefully have started a dialog about the particular NWP model issues involved; we basically had planned to act as moderators of the forums for global and mesoscale models. We also hoped that case studies would be brought to our attention by the operational field meteorologists that would make for good "mind fodder" to evoke discussion.
It didn't work out that way, unfortunately.
It didn't work out that way, unfortunately.