Developmental Testbed Center support of the Hurricane WRF for community use

The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is a joint effort between the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the Global Systems Division (GSD) at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. The dual mission of the DTC is to accelerate the infusion of promising new numerical weather prediction (NWP) and data assimilation capabilities developed by the research community into operational application, while also making operational NWP code and an entire model end-to-end testing and evaluation system available and supportable to the research community. Over the past two years, the DTC has taken on the challenge to provide the operational Hurricane HWRF running at the NOAA Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) to the community. This presentation summarizes what the DTC has accomplished thus far towards this goal.

Components of HWRF have been successfully ported to supercomputers at NCAR and ESRL that are used by the DTC – these include the Simplified Arakawa-Schubert cumulus scheme, the HWRF boundary layer and microphysics schemes, the vortex-following movable grid nesting technique, and the bogus vortex and relocation initialization techniques. Regression tests and additional multi-season hurricane simulations have been run as a prerequisite to checking the code into the repository. The paper by Bao et al. at this conference provides details on this.

There are other tasks besides porting the code that need to be completed prior to being able to support HWRF to the community in the form of a tutorial. These tasks include writing the scientific and users' documentation, further testing against the HWRF version running at EMC, and developing tutorial use cases. It is also necessary to have the code for HWRF fully in the repository before conducting the first tutorial, which is scheduled for February 2010 at NCAR. Currently the operational HWRF is based on WRF v2.2, with additional modifications made by EMC, while the current WRF code is contained in public release v3.1 (as of April 2009). The goal at the DTC is to have HWRF v3.1 constitute the new base code for the operational HWRF v2.2. Once all components of HWRF have been ported to the repository, then the research and operational communities can operate from the same code base. All of the atmospheric components of HWRF have been ported to the DTC systems at NCAR and ESRL and raised to the WRF v3.01 standard. The physics components have recently been incorporated into the trunk of the WRF repository. Work has commenced on testing the ported Princeton Ocean Model (POM) coupling with the WRF-NMM atmospheric model. Also to be discussed at the conference is the HWRF code management plan agreed to by EMC and DTC to provide needed coordination between the research and operational communities.