NOAA upgrades GFS global weather model

Korina

NOAA has released a major update to their GFS global model, making significant improvements to the forecast outputs and consolidating Wavewatch 3 with GFS model. Full NOAA press release can be found here.

“This substantial upgrade to the GFS, along with ongoing upgrades to our supercomputing capacity, demonstrates our commitment to advancing weather forecasting to fulfill our mission of protecting life and property,” said Louis W. Uccellini, Ph.D., director, NOAA’s National Weather Service.

The upgrade ultimately results into a better forecast for our users with the following changes:

Wavewatch 3 replaced with GFS-Wave
improved forecast skills in many areas with better model resolution
Swell 3 available also for GFS-Wave

Check the new GFS Wave forecast on Windy - GFS Waves

_center

https://www.windy.com/-Waves-waves?gfsWaves,waves,34.748,-28.933,3,internal

idefix37

@korina
Now the new model covers the Mediterranean sea, which was not the case with the previous one.
https://community.windy.com/topic/9698/ww3-model?_=1616586794331

anthony10

Press release - "The GFS resolution will increase by doubling the number of vertical levels, from 64 to 127. Improvements to atmospheric physics will enhance snow and precipitation forecasting capabilities in this latest upgrade as well."

Has NOAA release the upgrade as of now?

Do these upgrades take affect within Windy straight away?

Thank you

Yves70

@anthony10
Yes, upgrade is in place and this is the version available with Windy

vsinceac

All GFS 0.25° grib files provided by NCEP/NOAA after this upgrade do contain announced changes. I don't know if Windy downloads grids of all available parameters/levels: data is huge (>0.5 GB for each forecast), while downloaded grids may be filtered by both coverage, forecast, parameter and level.
Obviously not all available parameters and levels are available via Windy UI.
Anyway, introducing all parameters and levels on UI would be useless for most of the Windy users (e.g. some parameters are available for levels 0.1 hPa, 0.2 hPa, etc.); they would be only useful for research purpose.