Combining the Common Community Physics Package with a Single-Column Model to Drive NWP Physics Advancements

The Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) contains a library of physical parameterizations and a software framework for connecting the parameterizations into suites and for interfacing with potentially any atmospheric host model. Through NOAA's Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS), the CCPP was populated with physics from version 15 of the operational GFS as well as physics comprising three other operational candidate suites for research and development. All suites within the CCPP have been made operable with NOAA's Unified Forecast System (UFS) Atmosphere component through the CCPP framework. In addition, all parameterizations within the released CCPP can be used with a single-column model (SCM), recently developed within the Developmental Testbed Center. For development purposes, the SCM utilizes a similar data model and the same vertical coordinate and CCPP framework for calling physics as the UFS Atmosphere. As such, the SCM offers a simpler and considerably cheaper avenue for testing and developing atmospheric physics compared to the full UFS Atmosphere. Version 3 of the CCPP was publicly released alongside this SCM as both a simple example of a model utilizing the CCPP framework and as a tool for more basic physics development. This release included case studies based on a variety of observational field campaigns with provided initial conditions, model forcing, and comparative data in the same GitHub repository. Physics developers can utilize this package to rapidly develop and test prototype code as well as to tune and explore the parameter space. Given a set of case studies representing a broad enough spectrum of meteorological conditions, a physics scheme's performance within a suite can be characterized readily, although of course, fully coupled, three-dimensional testing and traditional verification is necessary to understand a scheme's true operational performance.

To extend the utility of this software package, several improvements are planned. One such improvement is the expansion of available cases through three mechanisms: a friendly avenue for users to create their own cases, the addition of more observationally-based field campaign cases, and perhaps most importantly for operational R&D, the ability to drive the SCM using output tendencies from the UFS Atmosphere. The last capability is important for developers at NOAA EMC to "zoom in" on problem areas within regional and global forecasts and to be able to replicate the issues within the SCM framework. Another planned improvement is a more streamlined and capable user interface, for users to more easily modify initial conditions and forcing, for configuring the physics, and for visualizing output. Current capabilities of the CCPP/SCM framework and the status of ongoing work will be presented.