This report is organized with a section on LAPS improvements followed by a project highlights section. One key to our long term success is the ability to leverage similar work done for multiple projects into LAPS improvements, especially since only a small portion of our funding is specifically earmarked for such software development. Conversely, specific LAPS improvements often benefit multiple projects. The number of collaborative projects that I work on has become relatively large and these may not be fully reflected in the original CIRA statement of work due to the fluid nature of new contracts being agreed to at various times. To me this all lends credence to the notion of amalgamating some of the project work into common themes of software development for improved organization in this report.

A fix was made for the observation reader and converter that FAB colleague Yuanfu Xie had written so that it can simultaneously read wind and temperature observations. This applies to the GSI and potentially the DHS projects. Several library subroutines are being generalized to help with the converter software. A surface observation blacklist update was supplied by the Wichita WFO and will filter out many additional suspect observations, winds particularly.

Error handling for profiler/RASS NetCDF reads was improved by rearranging the if-then-else blocks. This should prevent memory overwrites by skipping the variable read when the variable doesn't exist. Boundary layer profiler/RASS ingest was made more robust in sorting out valid data reports from various times. SODAR ingest was flipped to read data in the normal convention from lower to higher levels. These improvements are benefitting various runs such as RSA range data ingest.

I've worked towards more efficiency and other functional improvements for radar remapping and mosaicing. This is described in detail as follows.

We have a new domain radar list generator in place that runs during the localization. Scripts that drive the Archive-II to NetCDF converter were made more robust and flexible for both real-time and case study runs.

Radar polar-to-cartesian remapping code has a new error check for the number of radials. Quality control was improved in the 5km resolution regime. Radar data analysis in the vertical dimension now has improved gap filling capabilities between successive tilts.

In the radar mosacing program I reworked the looping strategy to allow a future memory saving option of rereading each radar individually. This program was also improved to more gracefully handle cases with missing radar data.

I improved the radar subsampling options allowing the wind analysis to run more efficiently on high resolution domains. The subsampling strategy thus allows for a greater number of multiple-Doppler radial velocity observations being fed into the wind analysis. One of these options filters the single-Doppler radar obs using a 5x5 window instead of a 3x3 window to pare them down better. Future changes are envisioned that would allow superobs to be constructed from the radar data. The wind analysis now handles cases where the number of Doppler radars exceeds the number of LAPS levels.

A capability was added to analyze single level soundings/towers from the SND intermediate file that should help with the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) database. Wind profile instrument error is now read in by the profile data access routine while the handling of wind profiler surface observations was improved. A new wind observation library was created to allow more widespread usage of these routines in the observation converter program for GSI, WRF/DHS, and related endeavours. Wind analysis post- processing routines were added to this library area to allow GSI and other software to utilize them. The wind verification statistics text output is now more user friendly.

Removed includes of 'lapsparms.cmn' in several library and other routines so that namelist variables are now accessed via subroutines. This makes the software more transparent with respect to ongoing changes in parameter naming and handling. Some parameters are being made more dynamic to help in this reorganization. The GRIB2 library is now more complete in the software repository.

I am continuing work on an overhaul of our IDL and related shell scripts that will QC and time interpolate the baseline AWC mosaics, then reproject and time interpolate an overlay of the Meteosat and MTSAT images. The goal is to produce a global IR satellite mosaic with improved time resolution compared to our existing real-time animations.

I conducted SOS demos for the Longmont Astronomical Society as well as a visiting astronomer from Maui. Plans are underway to conduct an SOS demo of planetary satellites for participants of a related conference being held in Boulder. I updated the global maps of Saturn's satellites Dione, Iapetus, and Titan based on recent Cassini spacecraft imagery.