Santander Meteorology Group
http://www.meteo.unican.es
A multidisciplinary approach for weather & climate
WRF basics
Markel García Díez
[email protected]
Santander Meteorology Group
Dept Applied Mathematics and Comp. Sci.
Universidad de Cantabria, Santander, Spain
VALUE downscaling
CORWES/WRF4G schooltutorial
hands-on 6-15 November 2012,
4-5 October Santander,
2012, Tenerife,Spain
Spain
Santander Meteorology Group
Index
A multidisciplinary approach for weather & climate
1. Introduction. What is WRF?
2. Why is it useful?
3. WRF workflow: WPS and WRF
4. Namelists and other configuration files
5. WRF online tutorial
Santander Meteorology Group
What is WRF?
A multidisciplinary approach for weather & climate
What is WRF?
WRF = Weather Research and Forecasting model
● WRF is a Limited Area Model (LAM) developed by NCAR, NOAA/
ESRL, NOAA/NCEP/EMC and others.
●Is a community model, with distributed development and
centralized support. The code is freely available on internet.
● It has 2 dynamical cores:
- Advanced Research WRF (ARW) → Research
- Non-Hydrostatic Mesoscale Model (NMM) → Operational
Santander Meteorology Group
Why is it useful?
A multidisciplinary approach for weather & climate
Why is it useful?
WRF is able to downscale coarser models to high resolutions ~ 1
km with non-hydrostatic dynamics. Furthermore, it offers many
advantages with respect to other LAM:
●It is open source. It is possible to look into the code and modify it.
Experiments are reproducible.
● Flexibility: Large amount of different configurations (physics,
dynamics, boundaries) adaptable for higher or coarser resolutions,
long-term or short-term simulations.
● Online support, and excellent documentation:
http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/
Santander Meteorology Group
Introduction
A multidisciplinary approach for weather & climate
Applications
Parametrization research, case studies, short range forecast, data
assimilation, air quality studies, renewal energy production forecast,
and renewal energy potential evaluation, and of course Regional
Climate
Most frequent experiments are sensitivity experiments. These
experiments:
●Provide a better understanding of the physics and their
shortcomings.
● Can be used to reduce model error and assess the uncertainty.
Santander Meteorology Group
WRF workflow
A multidisciplinary approach for weather & climate
WRF workflow
● WRF Preprocessing System (WPS)
- Tools to prepare the data that WRF is going to ingest (geogrid,
ungrib, and metgrid). They process the driving model data as well
as the static data.
● WRF model
- Initialization program: real.exe
- Numerical integration program: wrf.exe
Santander Meteorology Group
Wrf workflow
A multidisciplinary approach for weather & climate
WRF workflow
Taken from http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/tutorial/201207/WRF_Overview_Dudhia.pdf
Santander Meteorology Group
Wrf workflow
A multidisciplinary approach for weather & climate
WPS WRF workflow
Taken from http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/tutorial/201207/WRF_Overview_Dudhia.pdf
Santander Meteorology Group
Wrf workflow
A multidisciplinary approach for weather & climate
WRF workflow WRF
Taken from http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/tutorial/201207/WRF_Overview_Dudhia.pdf
Santander Meteorology Group
Wrf workflow
A multidisciplinary approach for weather & climate
Santander Meteorology Group
Wrf workflow
A multidisciplinary approach for weather & climate
Santander Meteorology Group
WRF namelists
A multidisciplinary approach for weather & climate
WRF namelists:
Namelists are simple ASCII files
which are used to define a large
amount of parameters of WRF
configuration.
WPS → namelist.wps
WRF → namelist.input
Other configuration files:
GEOGRID.TBL, METGRID.TBL,
Vtables, etc.
Santander Meteorology Group
WRF-ARW online tutorial
A multidisciplinary approach for weather & climate
WRF-ARW online tutorial
● The best way to familiarize with Wrf workflow is to follow the online
tutorial available in http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/OnLineTutorial/
●In this lecture, we are going to run the default case of the tutorial.
Please go to
http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/OnLineTutorial/CASES/JAN00/index.html
