There are a few interesting items today - read 'em all:
1) The backup RUC at FSL has been changed to run on a new computer as of yesterday afternoon. This computer is an HPTi Linux cluster that will be the platform for testing 20 and 10km versions of the RUC in the future, plus a lot of other model/assimilation/observation sensitivity kinds of testing. Many folks in FSL contributed to getting the HPTi cluster up and running -- Kevin Brundage and Tracy Smith got the RUC backup going on the cluster, with an SGI frontend for pre and post-processing. There is an interesting article on the new FSL HPTi cluster written by a non-FSL person (hence a few inaccuraces, but you can still get the flavor) in a Linux web site at http://lwn.net/2000/features/FSLCluster/.
 The backup RUC on the HPTi cluster is giving good results, according to the web products for the backup RUC and statistical verification against raobs performed at FSL. For those of you keeping track of the exact version of the model, we have temporarily reverted to a version that is not as advanced as the Grell version introduced to the backup on 16 Nov 99, but is still more advanced than that operational at NCEP. The backup RUC change log at http://maps.fsl.noaa.gov/RUCbackup.changelog.cgi has been updated to reflect this change
 2) The observation count scripts have been updated finally for the NCEP IBM SP computer and for the backup RUC. Check 'em out under the RUC/MAPS web page under the index on the left side. These counts have been out of whack for many months - we apologize for this, but they're back now.
 3) NCEP announced yesterday that they plan to use the backup RUC from about 1700-2100 UTC on Monday 27 March. Check the NCEP status messages (again under the index on the left on the RUC/MAPS page) on Monday to see the latest.

Stan Benjamin