A Community Workflow for the Stand-Alone Regional (SAR) Configuration of the FV3

We present various aspects and features of a community workflow being developed by the DTC (Developmental Testbed Center) for running the community version of the FV3 (Finite Volume Cubed Sphere) atmosphere model in its stand-alone regional (SAR) configuration. This work is part of a multi-center/NOAA lab effort (GSD, EMC, NSSL, and NCAR) to develop a SAR-FV3 that will be accessible to and usable by the wider research community (e.g. university researchers). The set of experiment and workflow generation scripts are easily configurable and include extensive error and compatibility checks to inform the user of inconsistent configurations before any forecasts are launched. The capabilities of the community workflow thus far include: (1) generation of arbitrary and predefined regional domains with nearly-uniform grids [e.g. North American domain with 13km cells (RAP-like), continental US domain with 3km cells (HRRR-like)]; (2) generation of filtered topography on such domains/grids; (3) generation of climatological fields on these grids; (4) generation of initial and surface fields from any one of several external NWP models; (5) generation of lateral boundary conditions with specified boundary update interval (with the option to use a different external model than the one for initial and surface fields); (6) running of forecasts using the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP)-enabled version of the FV3; (7) outputting of fields on either the native SAR-FV3 grid or on grids supported by EMC's write-component regridding/output utility (e.g. rotated lat-lon, Lambert conformal); and (8) post-processing of output using the Unified Post Processor (UPP). The workflow is accompanied by detailed documentation to allow users to easily configure and run experiments without having to understand the various model components in detail.