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GSL scientists earn Outstanding Scientific Paper awards from NOAA Research

NOAA Research has announced the 2025 recipients of the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Outstanding Scientific Paper Awards. This year, two of the eight outstanding papers included significant contributions by GSL scientists, including one landmark paper led by the lab.

Annually, OAR recognizes several significant scientific publications and the OAR employees and affiliate authors for their wide-reaching impacts. These publications were deemed to be among the most original, important, useful, and best written.

Below are the award-winning papers that include authors from GSL and its affiliates from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Example HRRR forecasts for high-impact weather events: (a) evening supercells including an EF3 tornado producer impacting Dallas, TX [4-h simulated composite radar reflectivity forecast (dBZ) valid at 0100 UTC 21 Oct 2019]; (b) lake-effect snowstorm near Lakes Huron and Erie [17-h variable density accumulated snow depth (in.) valid at 2300 UTC 1 Dec 2020]; (c) 80-m wind speed (kt) during Iowa derecho (13-h forecast valid at 1700 UTC 10 Aug 2020); and (d) dense smoke pollution [PM2.5 concentrations (mg m-3 )] from Camp Fire in California (24-h forecast valid at 0000 UTC 11 Nov 2018).

The High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR): An Hourly Updating Convection-Allowing Forecast Model. Part I: Motivation and System Description was published in the American Meteorological Society’s Weather and Forecasting in August 2022. Lead-authored by GSL’s David Dowell, with contributions by the National Weather Service Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), the article provides an overview of the HRRR model, NOAA’s flagship rapidly-updating, high-resolution, convection-allowing forecast model. This paper describes its initial design and development, its initialization approach and physical process representation, improvements and expanded capabilities since its initial implementation at National Weather Service operations in 2014, and a brief preview of the Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) that is currently under development as the natural follow-up to the HRRR modeling system. 

GSL federal and affiliate authors:

David Dowell (lead), Curtis Alexander, Eric James, Stephen Weygandt, John Brown, Joseph Olson, Ming Hu, Terra Ladwig, Ravan Ahmadov, Dave Turner, Trevor Alcott, Stanley Benjamin (CIRES), Tatiana Smirnova (CIRES), Jaymes Kenyon (CIRES), and Jeffrey Duda (CIRES)

Warn-on-Forecast System: From Vision to Reality was published in Weather and Forecasting in December 2023. Led by Pam Heinselman of the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL), this paper includes contributions from GSL’s David Dowell. The article is an overview of the Warn-on-Forecast System (WoFS), which utilizes existing and novel forecast models and innovative analysis and computing techniques to recommend warning-scale alerts on the timescale of hours, giving forecasters a significantly larger lead time ahead of severe weather threats. This project is one of many examples of the excellent collaboration between NSSL and GSL.

Congratulations to GSL’s and all of the authors for contributing to these outstanding papers. The papers will be recognized by Steven Thur, NOAA OAR Assistant Administrator, at the NOAA Outstanding Scientific Paper Award Ceremony held virtually on June 26, and a full collection of the eight award-winning papers is available at the NOAA Institutional Repository.

Last Update: June 24, 2025

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