New GFS Products on weather.utah.edu

Upgrades to products on weather.utah.edu continue.  Today I added new hourly and total precipitation graphics for the GFS-13km dataset.  

There are actually products available on weather.utah.edu from three GFS datasets.  Products under GFS-0.25deg are based on a GFS dataset with quarter degree by quarter degree latitude/longitude grid spacing.  Products under GFS-13km are based on a GFS dataset with 13-km grid spacing.  Finally, the GFS-Downscaled products are downscaled here at the U to 800-meter grid spacing from the quarter degree GFS dataset.  

Confusing?  Try being me.  

Most people don't bother with the 13-km dataset for a few reasons.  Perhaps the main one is that it doesn't include many atmospheric variables, limiting its use for forecasting.  I don't know why this is, but it mostly includes land-surface variables.  Even precipitation is not provided except as a mean precipitation rate, which to make things complicated has varying intervals depending on the forecast hour.  It's not fun to deal with and I have to do a lot of algebraic manipulation of the data to extract hourly and total precipitation.  The math is straightforward, but it is easy to make mistakes in code.  

However, I personally like using the high-resolution precipitation in these models, although during the monsoon, the GFS precipitation is still fairly unrealistic looking.  Below are examples of the GFS-13km hourly precipitation and total precipitation from this morning's GFS run.

Compare to the corresponding HRRR forecast, which has a smaller grid spacing (3 km) and a more physically realistic (but still imperfect) structure. 

The GFS isn't designed, however, for short-range, detailed forecasts. It's designed for global forecasts going out to 16 days.  Still, the short-range forecasts from the GFS are useful and very important if you are a forecaster as no single model consistently outperforms another and in many instances ensembles of models are used for forecasting today.  

One product that is not available for the GFS-13km, but is available for the HRRR, is the radar and satellite composite.  This is because there is no synthetic radar or satellite analysis available from the GFS-13km dataset.