A brief history of DART
The DART project was initiated in August 2001, and in 2003, the Data Assimilation Research Section (DAReS) was officially formed at NSF NCAR. In 2004, the first officially supported version of DART was released. Consistent version control history is available back to 2005, making DART an extremely long-lived and well-supported software project. Since 2004, there have been more than 140 releases. The first release, Easter, began the trend of naming the major releases after islands in alphabetical order from Easter to Manhattan.
From Manhattan onwards, DART releases follow the rules of semantic versioning. The full list of releases including release notes can be found on GitHub at NCAR/DART/releases.
Release |
Date |
Brief description |
|---|---|---|
Easter |
08 Mar 2004 |
Initial release |
Fiji |
29 Apr 2004 |
Enhanced portability; support for CAM and WRF |
Guam |
12 Aug 2004 |
New observation modules |
Pre-Hawaii |
20 Dec 2004 |
New filtering algorithms |
Hawaii |
28 Feb 2005 |
New filtering algorithms |
DA Workshop 2005 |
13 Jun 2005 |
Tutorial, observation preprocessing |
Pre-Iceland |
20 Oct 2005 |
Huge expansion of real observation capability |
Iceland |
23 Nov 2005 |
Huge expansion of real observation capability |
Post-Iceland |
20 Jun 2006 |
Observation-space adaptive inflation |
Pre-J |
02 Oct 2006 |
Updated scalable filter algorithm |
Jamaica |
12 Apr 2007 |
Vertical localization, extensive MPI testing |
Kodiak |
30 Jun 2011 |
New obs types, new diagnostics, new utilities |
Lanai |
13 Dec 2013 |
Support for many new models, chemistry/aerosol types, new diagnostics, new utilities |
Manhattan v9.0 |
15 May 2017 |
Native netCDF support, better scaling/performance |
v10.0 |
24 May 2023 |
New build tools |
v11.0 |
11 Jan 2024 |
Quantile-Conserving Ensemble Filtering Framework (QCEFF) |
2009: Establishing DART as a Community Facility
In September 2009, DART was featured on the cover of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS):
To access the issue, see the September 2009 issue here. To read the DART article directly see the link. This BAMS article (Anderson et al. 2009) provided the first comprehensive description of DART as a community facility and marked an important milestone in the project’s early development.
2025: DART as a Modern Earth-System DA Framework
More than 15+ years of additional work have substantially expanded DART’s scope, including support for many new models and observation types, advanced ensemble and hybrid methods, and major improvements in software infrastructure and workflows. These developments and recent DART applications are documented in a new, system-wide update:
El Gharamti, M., H. Kershaw, K. Raeder, B. Raczka, B. Johnson, M. Smith, J. L. Anderson, D. Amrhein, N. Collins, I. Grooms, and L. Kugler (2025): The Data Assimilation Research Testbed: A Robust, Scalable Software Facility with Groundbreaking Capabilities for Model-Data Integration. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 106 (11), E2328-E2345. doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-24-0214.1
On the Publications page there are over 400 publications that use DART, although there are many additional publications using DART not listed. The 2009 BAMS paper has over 700 citations according to Google Scholar. The core algorithms used in DART have also been cited many more times. For example, the core EAKF algorithm (Anderson 2001) used in DART has over 2000 citations according to Google Scholar.
Since the Manhattan release in 2017 (v9.0), DART has averaged ~700 commits and ~16 releases per year. Most of the code updates are backwards-compatible, ensuring that user codes continue to run unchanged while still benefiting from new capabilities. The bar chart below shows the number of releases per 12-months interval, while the shaded area represents the commit activity over the same period. Major releases such as Manhattan, v10.0, v11.0 are also annotated. This image highlights the relationship between code-release milestones and overall development activity.
