After Monday's telecon, John Brown and I talked to Paul Sisson and Will Murray at Burlington, VT, who have been looking at RUC2 stuff quite a bit. They had noticed that the sfc temps over the Great Lakes seemed quite a bit too warm.

This started an investigation with a good ending. We confirmed that the RUC2 sfc temps over the Gt Lks were much warmer than in the 40km MAPS, and that the Gt Lakes lake sfc temps were too warm in RUC2 and warmer than in the 40km MAPS. Eric Rogers at NCEP helped at this point, and we looked at a web site

http://sgi62.wwb.noaa.gov:8080/cgi-bin/view_etasst.pl

that has a nice plot of the daily regional SST/LST analysis used in both the Eta runs as well as RUC2. Lo and behold, it turns out that because of a switch of some processing to a different computer, the Great Lakes temps hadn't been updated since October.

So, as of tomorrow, this will be fixed for the RUC2 and the Eta and meso-Eta runs. Thanks to Paul and Will and Eric.

Stan