Coalescing Atmospheric Physics: Recent Development, Collaboration, and Use of the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP)

For almost a decade, from ideation to implementation and research to operations, the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) has provided the means to collect, organize, and distribute atmospheric physics for use in Earth system models. Collections of interoperable physics schemes exist in multiple software repositories, all related by their adherence to a set of inter-institutional guidelines for their interface and descriptions of their component variables via metadata. In addition, an extensible software framework that operates during a host model’s build-time to autogenerate suite-specific physics drivers has been and continues to be developed and publicly released alongside the physics scheme repositories. Furthermore, a simple single-column model (SCM) that serves as an example host model implementation of the entire CCPP software system and for performing scientific studies of physics schemes and suite performance rounds out the development ecosystem.

Recent developments related to the seventh public software release for the CCPP physics, framework, and SCM will be discussed. Of particular note is an updated, more flexible capability to generate SCM cases from Unified Forecast System, either from limited-area or global configurations. As with previous releases, this work is an example of robust collaboration amongst scientists and engineers from many institutions representing a broad-reaching community. Although principal developers mainly hail from NOAA, NCAR, and NRL, input is sought and incorporated from academia and other government agencies, especially via the CCPP Visioning Workshop in the summer of 2023. Such community development has made and continues to make the CCPP useful for a broad range of applications from research to operations.