Development of Unified Post Processing System (UPP) for FV3-Based Global, Regional, Hurricane, and Ensemble Systems

The Unified Post Processing System (UPP) was developed at NOAA National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and is used as the common unified post post processor for all NOAA operational models. The UPP has the capability to post-process output from a variety of NWP models, including GFS, GEFS, NAM, CFS, HRRR, RAP, WRF. It can handle various model output format including Nemsio and netcdf, and interpolates output from the model’s native grids to National Weather Service (NWS) standard levels (isobaric levels) and other non-model surface levels and output data in World Meteorological Organization (WMO) GRIB1 or GRIB2 format.

NOAA selected the GFDL finite­ volume cubed-sphere dynamical core (FV3) as the Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS) dynamical core. The development has been made in the UPP for supporting fv3 based global, regional, hurricane and ensemble systems implementations. Through collaboration with model developers internal and external of the NCEP Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), a lot of new features and enhancements, including new model read interfaces, algorithms for calculating marine product and simulated GOES-16/17 product were incorporated or integrated in the UPP. Driven by user’s requests and feedback, many new fields such as accumulated precipitation and simulated composed radar reflectivity are generated to better support FV3 user community. Efforts were also made for configuring and running the UPP on all NCEP production/development computers and NOAA R&D computers.