The DART project was initiated in August 2001, and in 2003, the Data Assimilation Research Section (DAReS) was officially formed at 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 a dozen releases. The first release, Easter, began the trend of naming the major releases after islands in alphabetical order in the following sequence:
| Release | Date | Brief description |
|---|---|---|
| Easter | 8 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 | 15 May 2017 | Native netCDF support, better scaling/performance |
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 article here.
On the Publications page there are over 40 example publications that use DART, although there are many additional publications using DART not listed. The seminal BAMS paper has over 400 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 1500 citations according to Google scholar.