Copy and paste job of a post I made in another forum:
Not long to go now until GASP, LAPS, MesoLAPS and TXLAPS are going to be no more and replaced by ACCESS. It's still planned to take effect by the 30th July. Some of the more interesting planned upgrades to this model in the future include ingestion of weather radar data - both rainfall and doppler winds (although this has been done for awhile now in countries such as the US), enhancing the ensemble version of it which gives probabilities of weather elements happening, using more satellite data, a polar domain and increase in horizontal resolutions e.g. ACCESS-C for capital cities will initially have a resolution of 5km. Synthetic radar imagery which is basically forecast radar imagery/reflectivity (which again has been done in other countries for awhile) and synthetic satellite imagery are fields that are also generated by this model.
Another new domain dedicated for TC's called ACCESS-TC is also currently planned to be up and running by next summer.
There'll be some basic freely available fields from this model at first including mid/upper level charts via links on http://www.bom.gov.au/nmoc/ (soon to be revamped with a viewer) with more planned to be added later.The skill of ACCESS is lagging a bit behind EC and UK but I hope it gets better in the future. Meanwhile, GFE is still planned to be fully operational in NSW at the start of Sep (Forecast Explorer uses GFE data).
Ken.
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