Article I – Scope

This Implementing Arrangement describes the scientific and
technical activities to be undertaken by the American Institute
in Taiwan (AIT), through its designated representative, the
Global System Division (GSD), (formally the Forecast Systems
Laboratory) of the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) of
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),
United States Department of Commerce. It provides for continuing
development of the forecast system being developed by the Joint
Forecast Systems Project. This project is a cooperative effort
between the Central Weather Bureau (CWB), the designated
representative of the Taipei Economic and Cultural
Representative Office in the United States (TECRO), and AIT's
designated representative, NOAA/ESRL/ GSD. This Implementing
Arrangement is of mutual interest to both TECRO and AIT,
hereafter referred to as the parties. The products of this
Implementing Arrangement will provide substantial value through
development of new and upgraded capabilities and applications
that can be integrated into other NOAA/ ESRL/GSD systems.


Article II – Authorities

The activities described in this Implementing Arrangement will
be carried out under the general terms and conditions
established by the Agreement between the Taipei Economic and
Cultural Representative Office in the United States and the
American Institute in Taiwan for Technical Cooperation in
Meteorology and Forecast Systems Development (TECRO-AIT
Agreement), and any subsequent revision as agreed to by the
parties. This Implementing Arrangement is the twenty first such
arrangement under a succession of umbrella agreements between
TECRO and AIT.

This Implementing Arrangement is hereby attached to that
Agreement and becomes part of the Agreement.


Article III – Services

During the period of Implementing Arrangement #21, TECRO's and
AIT's designated representatives respectively, the CWB and
NOAA/ESRL/GSD joint team, will focus on four tasks: (1) the HRQ2
(Highresolution Quantitative Precipitation Estimation and
Quantitative Precipitation Forecast) advanced 3DVAR data
assimilation implementation and verification, (2) the HRQ2
(High-resolution Quantitative Precipitation Estimation and
Quantitative Precipitation Forecast) applications improvement,
(3) continuing interaction on earlier cooperative projects, and
(4) GPS Radio Occultation satellite data assimilation using the
NCEP/ JCSDA Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) analysis
system. Tasks under this Implementing Arrangement range from
full scale developmental collaboration to system upgrades and
support that allow systems to operate with the latest technical
and scientific capabilities and specifications. These ongoing
activities, described in more detail in the Statement of Work,
will include the following four tasks:

Task #1 - HRQ2 (High-Resolution Quantitative Precipitation
Estimation and Quantitative Precipitation Forecast) advanced
3DVAR data assimilation implementation and verification

In the past 15 years, the statistical analysis approach such as
standard 3DVAR or ensemble Kalman filter has been the focal
point for data assimilation. Even though many researches have
been done in these areas, there is no clear evidence that this
analysis technique has been improved significantly under an
operational environment. For example, with the same datasets, it
has not been shown that the statistical approaches are superior
to a traditional objective analysis.

STMAS (Space and Time Multi-scale Analysis System) merges the
advantages of objective analysis and modem variational analysis
into a unified data assimilation system and removes the
limitations of these data assimilation schemes. For example,
without an accurate error covariance, STMAS can extract the
resolvable information from all observation datasets, including
radar and satellite datasets, whereas a standard 3DVAR or 4DVAR
may have problems because an accurate error covariance is
difficult to compute. STMAS handles remotely sensed observation
datasets through a variational minimization process with
appropriate constraints dynamically; where traditional objective
analysis has to treat these constraints as post processes with
possibilities of losing useful information.

STMAS is a new and advanced data assimilation technique with a
superior analysis advantage. TECRO's designated representative,
CWB, could benefit from using this system for its operational
applications and from participating in system development and
improvement. During Implementing Arrangement #21, two STMAS
tasks will be performed by AIT's designated representative,
NOAA/ESRL/GSD; one is the STMAS surface analysis, and the other
is the STMAS 3D system implementation. The surface analysis is
mainly used for CWB weather reanalysis to provide the
ground-truth for establishing a climatology statistics. The
STMAS 3D system can further improve CWB weather reanalysis using
upper air datasets to overcome the complex terrain effect.

Under the STMAS surface analysis task, the software package will
be modified to improve the efficiency to meet the application
requirement for TECRO's designated representative, CWB. Also the
STMAS analysis will be improved with more sophisticated
background effect, water-land interaction, quality control
mechanism, and a complex terrain factor.

With support of AIT's designated representative, NOAA/ ESRL/GSD,
TECRO's designated representative, CWB, will perform a whole
year of reanalysis with calibrated parameters for STMAS, such as
length-scale, multigrid levels, smoothing and penalty function
for various reanalysis fields such as P, T, Td, U, V and
precipitation. For a longer-term reanalysis, a careful
verification is required to examine each of the reanalysis
fields and to build up climatology verification statistics.
These verification statistics can provide valuable evidence for
further improvement of STMAS surface analysis in the future.

Under the STMAS 3D system implementing task, TECRO's designated
representative, CWB, will apply it for the upper air reanalysis
to overcome the complex terrain effect and to use other upper
air data sources such as radar datasets. CWB will also use STMAS
3D to initialize CWB regional models for improving short range
forecasts. CWB and AIT's designated representative,
NOAA/ESRL/GSD, will collaborate on the verification and model
initialization of the STMAS 3D system.

AIT's designated representative, NOAA/ESRL/GSD, and TECRO's
designated representative, CWB, will set up an analysis domain
and examine the STMAS 3D analysis against the observations,
in-situ or remotely sensed data and calibrate the parameters for
the CWB analysis domain. NOAA/ESRL/GSD and CWB will perform
quality control over the CWB datasets and develop some automated
QC schemes if needed. With proper dynamical constraints,
NOAA/ESRL/ GSD and CWB will check the analysis balance for our
applications. CWB and NOAA/ESRL/GSD will perform a short range
of reanalysis using CWB datasets and accumulate statistical
information to compare to the STMAS surface analysis.
NOAA/ESRL/GSD and CWB will initialize a CWB regional model
(WRF-ARW) using STMAS and compare it with other initialization
methods, such as LAPS, and to further improve STMAS 3D analysis.

AIT's designated representative, NOAA/ESRL/GSD, has provided a
comprehensive training on the evaluation and calibration of
short-range Probabilistic Quantitative Precipitation Forecasts
(PQPF) in 2008. This training covered ensemble system
configuration, evaluation of QPF and PQPF, CWB case studies and
applications. During Implementing Arrangement #21, NOAA/ESRL/
GSD will provide the graphic programs for PQPF products, and the
program for PQPF verification and technical support on ensemble
post processing schemes such as calibration artificial neural
network and linear regression. This task will benefit TECRO's
designated representative, CWB, in transferring the research
program of PQPF into their evaluation phase before operational
use.

Task #2 - HRQ2 (High-Resolution Quantitative Precipitation
Estimation and Quantitative Precipitation Forecast) applications
improvement

AIT's designated representative, NOAA/ESRL/GSD, understands that
the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) will continue
research towards the refinement, development, and maintenance of
HRQ2 applications required for TECRO's designated
representatives, the Central Weather Bureau (CWB), Water
Resources Agency (WRA) and the Soil and Water Conservation
Bureau (SWCB) operations. The NSSL research is directed towards
improving the monitoring and prediction of flash floods and
severe storm identification and short-term forecasting for the
Taiwan environment.

During Implementing Arrangement #21, AIT's designated
representative, NOAA/ESRL/GSD understands that the National
Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) will continue to improve the
HRQ2 system through research towards the 0-2 hour typhoon QPF
(Quantitative Precipitation Forecast). This task will include
the QPF performance assessment and any new development to
improve typhoon QPF based on the assessment from the current 0-2
hours QPF performance during typhoon cases. This task will
implement an enhanced sea clutter algorithm to improve radar
data quality control. This task will improve the short term QPF
during a typhoon heavy rainfall situation and eliminate
precipitation uncertainty due to sea clutter. TECRO's designated
representatives, CWB and WRA/ SWCB, will benefit from receiving
a more reliable and higher quality product of precipitation
forecasts for the 0-2 hour period.

Two brand new C-band dual-polarization (dual-pol) radars now
been installed in Taiwan (RCMK at Makung and RCCK at Ching Chung
Kung). These radars will add new capability to measure rainfall
and discriminate hydrometer types. These two radars and a CWB
radar at Chi-Kuo will have excellent area coverage over the west
side of Taiwan. This new observation network will increase CWB's
capability for short-term precipitation prediction during severe
weather. It can help government emergency agencies to increase
the lead time to issue necessary warnings to protect the public.
This task will ingest and evaluate these new C-band radar data
for the HRQ2 system. NSSL will release the software source code
for the HRQ2 web verification system and the radar data ingest
source code. In addition, four progress reports will be provided
as part of this task.

Task #3 - Continuing Interaction on Earlier Cooperative Projects

Several earlier cooperative tasks have been completed.
Technology has been transferred successfully and is beginning to
be used operationally at the facility of TECRO's designated
representative, CWB. AIT's designated representative,
NOAA/ESRL/GSD, development activities in these areas will
continue, and further NOAA/ESRL/GSD-CWB interaction is important
to keep CWB staff up-to-date on current developments. This task
will directly improve and update CWB's current forecast
assistant and decision making system at an appropriate level,
including new AWIPS and relevant forecast assistant application
software releases and available documents.

AIT's designated representative, NOAA/ESRL/GSD, released the
latest AWIPS OB 8.3.1 and necessary test datasets to TECRO's
designated representative, CWB, near the end of 2008. This
version is the one currently used by NOAA/NWS. This version is
ready to accept dual-pol radar products and has the capability
to integrate radar data with environment sampling of
temperature, relative humidity, wind, equivalent potential
temperature, wet-bulb temperature, and pressure at the height of
the radar beam. CWB will access data from two new dual-pol
radars soon, so this new radar product display capability will
be extremely useful for its forecast and decision making
operation. NOAA/ESRL/ GSD will continue to make the latest AWIPS
build software available, if applicable, during Implementing
Arrangement #21.

NOAA/NWS has awarded a contract in 2005 to Raytheon Technical
Services Company for the development of the next generation of
AWIPS, called AWIPS II. AWIPS II is based on Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA). AIT's designated representative,
NOAA/ESRL/GSD, is tasked to perform an Independent Validation
and Verification (IV&V) for each task order released by
Raytheon. NOAA/ESRL/GSD plans to share some experience of AWIPS
II in the area of SOA, EDEX (Environmental Data Exchange handles
data ingest, storage and communication) and CAVE (Common AWIPS
Visualization Environment is the graphical user interface) with
CWB, if appropriate, during Implementing Arrangement #21.

AIT's designated representative, NOAA/ESRL/GSD, has a long
history in supporting research and operational weather
forecasting by developing advanced prototype workstation display
systems. We have an ongoing ALPS (AWIPS Linux Prototype System)
development, which is an evolution change to AWIPS, and FXC
(FXCollaborate) development which is an Internet-based system
for displaying data from AWIPS with additional drawing and
briefing tools. CWB has adopted FXC as an addition to its
capability of drawing tools in 2008. AIT's designated
representative, NOAA/ESRL/GSD, has provided in-depth training on
GFE/Text Formatter and GHG (Graphical Hazards Generator) to
support TECRO's designated representative, CWB, development of
FIES (Forecast Information Editing System) in 2008. CWB has a
plan to implement such a graphical editing capability and a
Chinese text generator as part of their forecast assistant tool
for township weather forecasts including severe weather warning
products of a few kilometers space resolution. NOAA/ESRL/GSD
will continue to provide interaction support including software
update, available documents of ALPS, FXC, and GFE training, if
applicable.

For the data feed support, AIT' s designated representative,
NOAA/ESRL/GSD, will continue to provide the NOAAPORT data feed
for CWB's data assimilation purposes during Implementing
Arrangement #21. NOAA/ESRL/GSD will also continue to calculate
IPW (Integrated Precipitable Water) values using CWB's
ground-based Global Positioning System (GPS) with some
additional sites and will transfer IPW values to CWB for
application use during Implementing Arrangement #21.
NOAA/ESRL/GSD will continue develop Google Maps based user
interface to allow easy visualization of IPW values and other
meteorological variables for validation and verification by CWB
users.

This continuing interaction task will benefit TECRO's designated
representative, CWB, with the updated knowledge of the forecast
assistant and decision making system developed at NOAA. This
task also provides the important data feed of NOAAPORT and
GPS/IPW for CWB's daily operation needs. Finally, AIT's
designated representative, NOAA/ESRL/GSD, will provide necessary
visitor training, exchange of visits, copies of papers and
reports, and e-mail interactions, if applicable.

Task # 4 - GPS Radio Occultation satellite data assimilation
using the NCEP/JCSDA Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI)
analysis system

As part of the COSMIC (Constellation Observing System for
Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate) mission, TECRO's designated
representative, the Central Weather Bureau, will support the
inclusion of GPS Radio Occultation (RO) observations from the
COSMIC mission into the NCEP's regional system to implement the
Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) data assimilation of
GPS radio occultation data under the joint collaboration project
between NOAA/NASA/DoD JCSDA and the Central Weather Bureau
(CWB). NCEP is the National Centers for Environmental Prediction
under NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS). JCSDA (Joint Center
for Satellite Data Assimilation) is a multi-agency research
center tasked with improving the use of satellite data for
analyzing and predicting the weather, the ocean, the climate and
the environment. JCSDA partner agencies are NASA (National
Aeronautics and Space Administration), NOAA/ NESDIS (National
Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service) and DoD
(Department of Defense). The main objectives of this
collaborative project are to tune and test the assimilation of
GPS RO data in the NCEP regional system and to accelerate and
enhance the use of GPS RO data in global numerical weather
prediction at CWB. Currently, TECRO's designated representative,
CWB, is performing global numerical weather prediction using its
own global model and an older version of the NCEP data
assimilation system, the Spectral Statistical Interpolation
(SSI). Through this collaboration, CWB would like to enhance
their global data assimilation system and to make optimal use of
satellite data, including COSMIC/FORMOSAT-3. Accordingly, CWB
would like to migrate from SSI to GSI, and to initialize the CWE
global model with an analysis generated by GSI. This task will
cover the use of GSI in both global and regional capabilities.
In exchange, CWB will contribute to the tuning and testing of
the GPS RO assimilation in the regional model.


Article IV - Responsibilities of TECRO

In addition to participation in the joint project team, TECRO
through its designated representative, CWB shall:
A. Provide overall coordination project activities at the CWB
facility;
B. Assign appropriate staff to perform the activities defined in
this Implementing Arrangement and provide support in
accordance with the terms of the umbrella agreement; and
C. Fulfill its responsibilities under the Statement of Work for
Implementing Arrangement #21.


Article V - Responsibilities of AIT

In addition to participation in the joint project team, AIT,
through its designated representative, NOAA/ESRL/ GSD shall:
A. Provide overall coordination project activities at the
NOAA/ESRL/GSD facility in Boulder, Colorado;
B. Provide administrative support for preparing reports for
delivery to TECRO's designated representative, CWB, in
accordance with this Implementing Arrangement;
C. Assign appropriate staff to perform the activities defined in
this Implementing Arrangement and provide support in
accordance with the terms of the umbrella agreement; and
D. Fulfill its responsibilities under the Statement of Work for
Implementing Arrangement #21.


Article VI - Financial Provisions

In accordance with the TECRO-AIT Agreement, TECRO is required to
reimburse AIT for all costs incurred by AIT's designated
representative, NOAA/ ESRL/GSD, in association with the project
covered by this Implementing Arrangement. AIT shall transfer to
NOAA/ESRL/GSD all payments made by TECRO to AIT for costs
incurred by NOAA/ESRL/GSD in association with this Implementing
Arrangement.

The total cost for activities described in this Implementing
Arrangement is mutually agreed to be U.S. $680,000. TECRO agrees
to transfer fifty percent of the funds to AIT in advance, with
the remaining fifty percent to be transferred upon completion of
the year's activities, to the extent that funds for this purpose
have been provided by TECRO.

The performance by AIT's designated representative of activities
under this Implementing Arrangement is subject to the
availability of funds.


Article VII - Intellectual Property Considerations

No intellectual property considerations are expected to arise in
conjunction with activities described in this Implementing
Arrangement. Existing system designs and computer software of
the AIT's designated representative's, NOAA/ESRL/GSD, Forecast
System are in the public domain. Reports, specifications, and
computer software prepared under this Implementing Arrangement
also will be in the public domain once NOAA and CWB have
approved them in final form.


Article VIII - Effective Date, Amendment, and Termination

This Implementing Arrangement is effective on the date of the
last signature hereto. This Implementing Arrangement may be
amended and/or terminated in accordance with the terms of the
Agreement. The estimated completion date for the activities
described in this Implementing Arrangement and the termination
date of this Implementing Arrangement is December 31, 2009.



Ta-Tung J. Chang Barbara J. Schrage
Deputy Representative Managing Director
Date: Date:
July 13, 2009 May 8, 2009