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The Weather & Chaos project of the University of Maryland,   College Park (UMCP) was started by Distinguished Professor Eugenia Kalnay of Department of Atmospheric and   Oceanic Science and Distinguished Professor Jim Yorke  of the Institute for   Phyical Science and Technology in 2000. They assembled a group   of experts to carry out interdisciplinary research in numerical weather prediction, dynamical system theory and scientific computation. The goal was to conduct research that would lead to a better understanding of the behavior of high-dimensional spatio-temporally chaotic systems, such as the atmosphere, and to improved techniques for numerical weather prediction. The initial funding for the project was generously provided by the W. M. Keck Foundation.

Since it was launched in 2000, the project has grown into a major   informal research and educational program at UMCP.The project has led   to the publication of many papers in   leading atmospheric science and physics journals and to over a dozen   Ph. D. dissertations in the Atmospheric   and Oceanic Science, Physiscs, Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and   Scientific Computation and Electrical Engineering doctoral   programs .

The most important product of our research efforts is the Local Ensemble Transform   Kalman Filter (LETKF) data assimilation system. This system allows for the estimation of the state of large spatio-temporally chaotic systems, such as the atmosphere, based on incomplete observations and a possibly imperfect numerical model of the system. In addition to the   UMCP scientists involved in the project,    scientists from the Arizona State   University, Tempe, AZ and the George Mason University, Fairfax, VA   have also made important contributions to the development of the   algorithm and the computer code.   The LETKF has been successfully tested on the Global Forecast System model (GFS) of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction/National Weather Service (NCEP/NWS) on the Regional Spectral Model (RSM) of NCEP/NWS, on the Finite-Volume Global Circulation Model of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and on a numerical model of laboratory convection. Current efforts of the Weather and Chaos Project include   implementation of the LETKF on the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics   Laboratory Mars General Circulation Model (GFDL Mars GCM), in   collaboration with NOAA GFDL, Princeton, NJ and the Atmospheric and   Environmental Research Inc., Lexington, MA and the development of an   LETKF-based system for the coupled assimilation of weather and carbon   observations to study the carbon cycle in the Earth system, in   collaboration with the University of California, Berkley, CA and the   Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA of  the   Department of Energy. The LETKF has been adopted as the next operational global data assimilation system system by CPTEC (Center for Weather prediction and climate studies of Brazil) and is  being tested at the Japanese   Meteorological Agency. The LETKF is also being tested for coastal   limited area data assimilation with an implementation on the   Estuarine and Coastal Ocean Model (ECOM) by AER Inc. A computationally highly efficient parallel FORTRAN code is available for downloading at http://math.la.asu.edu/~eric/letkf