Papers of note: Unleashing an automated mobile weather prediction system

Short-term meteorological forecasts and nowcasts are gaining importance for both economic and societal purposes, as well as gaining importance for military and defense applications. In response, an automated, rapidly relocatable nowcasting and prediction system has been developed at PSU. This Rapidly Relocatable Nowcast-Prediction System (RRNPS) provides a continuous stream of highly detailed nowcasts and uses extensive C-shell scripts to automate the data transfers and execution of all program modules. In the army profiler application, this RRNPS produces a real-time up-to-the-minute model nowcast every half hour. Its performance was evaluated using subjective and statistical methods and yields further insight into the value added by FDDA in RRNPS nowcasts. Furthermore, statistics show that the use of continuous FDDA improves the accuracy of the RRNPS nowcasts and will provide immediately available forecast-analysis products.