Data Assimilation Research Testbed

DART is a community facility for ensemble DA developed and maintained by the Data Assimilation Research Section (DAReS) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). DART provides modelers, observational scientists, and geophysicists with powerful, flexible DA tools that are easy to implement and use and can be customized to support efficient operational DA applications. DART is a software environment that makes it easy to explore a variety of data assimilation methods and observations with different numerical models and is designed to facilitate the combination of assimilation algorithms, models, and real (as well as synthetic) observations to allow increased understanding of all three. DART includes extensive documentation, a comprehensive tutorial, and a variety of models and observation sets that can be used to introduce new users or graduate students to ensemble DA. DART also provides a framework for developing, testing, and distributing advances in ensemble DA to a broad community of users by removing the implementation-specific peculiarities of one-off DA systems.