Announcements

Announcements

Code Release: 31 October 2023

The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) and the Unified Forecast System (UFS) community are proud to announce the public release of the Short-Range Weather Application (SRW App) version 2.2.0. This release is an update to the version 2.1.0 release from November 2022 and reflects a number of changes currently available in the SRW App develop branch. The Application is designed for short-range (up to two days) regional forecasts located anywhere on the globe. The new release includes the following updates:

• Bug fixes since the v2.1.0 release
• Addition of the supported FV3_RAP physics suite (PR #811) and support for the RRFS_NA_13km predefined grid
• Addition of FV3_GFS_v17_p8 physics suite (PR #574)
• Updates to CCPP that target the top of the main branch (which is ahead of CCPP v6.0.0). View a detailed summary of CCPP updates that came in ahead of the SRW App v2.2.0 release.
• Expansion of Level 1 platforms to include Derecho, Hercules, and Gaea C5 (PRs #894, #898, #911)
• Transition to spack-stack modulefiles for most supported platforms to align with the UFS WM shift to spack-stack (PRs #913 and #941)
• Overhaul of WE2E testing suite (see, e.g., PRs #686, #732, #864, #871)
• Improvements to the CI/CD automated testing pipeline (see, e.g., PRs #707 and #847)
• Incorporation of additional METplus verification capabilities (PRs #552, #614, #757, #853)
• Integration of the Unified Workflow’s templater tool (PR #793)
• Ability to create a user-defined custom workflow (PR #676
• Option to use a custom vertical coordinate file with different distribution of vertical layers (PR #813) and documentation on how to use this feature (PR #888)
• Incorporation of plotting tasks into the workflow (PR #482); addition of ability to plot on both CONUS and smaller regional grid (PR #560)
• Addition of a sample verification case (PR #500 with documentation
• A new tutorial chapter in the documentation (PR #584)
• Incorporation of UFS Case Studies within the WE2E framework (PRs #736 and #822)
• Air Quality Modeling (AQM) capabilities (unsupported but available; see PR #613)
• Miscellaneous documentation updates to reflect the changes above

The v2.2.0 User's Guide has been updated to reflect these improvements to the Application, and numerous test cases with all associated data files are also available to the public in the SRW App data bucket). Interested users can get support by submitting a question through the GitHub Discussions Q & A page.

Code Release: 17 November 2022

The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) and the Unified Forecast System (UFS) community are proud to announce the public release of the UFS Short-Range Weather (UFS SRW) Application version 2.1.0. This release is an update to the version 2.0.0 release from June 2022 and reflects a number of changes currently available at the head of the UFS SRW development branch. The Application is designed for short-range (up to two days) regional forecasts located anywhere on the globe. The new release includes the following updates:

• Conversion to a Python workflow (from the former shell workflow)
• Improved container support, including the option to run across compute nodes using Rocoto
• Updates to physical parameterizations within the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) (see detailed description here)
• Support for the Unified Post Processor (UPP) to be run inline
• Addition of a multi-purpose code clean-up script (devclean.sh)
• Improved support for the METplus verification suite

The User's Guide, available here, has been updated to reflect these improvements to the Application, and numerous test cases with all associated data files are also available to the public here. Interested users can get support by submitting a question through the GitHub Discussions.

Repository change: 8 September 2022

The regional_workflow repository has been deprecated and its contents and history merged into this repository. The details of this process can be found in the public announcement document. Users with remaining work in their fork of the regional_workflow repository can reference this page for instructions on migrating that work to the new, merged repository.

Code Release: 23 June 2022

The UFS Community is proud to announce the public release (version 2.0.0) of the UFS Short-Range Weather Application. This newly updated weather application is designed for short range (up to two days) regional forecasts located anywhere on the globe. It contains the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) v6.0.0, version 10.1.0 of the Unified Post Processor (UPP) and version 3.0.0 of the UFS Weather Model. Documentation has been significantly enhanced and numerous test cases with all associated data files are now available to the public. The application is highly portable and detailed instructions describe how to build and run on a wide variety of platforms, including Ubuntu Linux and MacOS.

Code Release: 4 March 2021

The UFS Short-Range Weather (SRW) Application v1.0.0 was publicly released on 3/4/2021. A news article is available at https://www.weather.gov/news/210403-ufs and a full release description can be found at https://ufscommunity.org/news/srwa. This is the first major release of the application that targets predictions of atmospheric behavior on a limited spatial domain and on time scales from less than an hour out to several days. The UFS SRW App is the foundation for building NOAA’s future convection-allowing ensemble forecast system, known as the Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS).

The first public release of the SRW App results from a collaboration between several cooperative institutes and universities, the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The release is available through the GitHub repository https://github.com/ufs-community/ufs-srweather-app, with full documentation available at https://ufs-srweather-app.readthedocs.io/en/ufs-v1.0.0 and support available through the UFS forums https://forums.ufscommunity.org/.