Description:

Weather and climate models continue to suffer from systematic biases, many of which are related to missing or poorly represented physical processes and deficiencies in model physics. Process-based testing and evaluation (T&E) are essential to identify and understand the causes of model biases, and to improve the overall performance of a weather/climate model. The overarching goal of the session is to bring together scientists who develop and evaluate numerical weather prediction and climate models (such as weather/climate, regional/global, coupled/uncoupled models, etc.). In this session, we will highlight the latest research on current and next-generation physical parameterizations addressing formulation, development and process-based evaluation of parameterizations for physical processes on short-, medium-, extended-range and climate time scales. We particularly encourage 1) contributions that address the design and development of community software tools that enable physics interoperability in an efficient and standardized manner in community models, 2) contributions related to process-based T&E and hierarchical testing to identify systematic model biases and improve our understanding of model physics, and 3) contributions using modeling systems represented in the National Earth System Prediction Capability (ESPC) such as the NOAA Unified Forecast System (UFS).