The Global Systems Division (GSD) of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) has been developing WRF Portal, a web-based Java Webstart GUI application. WRF Portal allows users to define and configure WRF model runs, run the models on local or remote systems, monitor the tasks while they are running, and inform users when they have completed. It also incorporates a domain wizard that allows users to graphically select or define their model domains. Support for both the WRF-ARW and WRF-NMM is provided in the current beta release.

WRF Portal is being developed in collaboration with researchers at the NOAA, NCAR, and the DTC to handle the need to configure and run many model runs in support of model researc and development activities and to perform the evaluation of NMM and ARW WRF model variants. Testing of ARW and NMM requires hundreds of model runs be done to compare and contrast model results. Additional tests are being done to investigate the sensitivity of the ARW to different choices of upper level damping depth and coefficients. New experients will vary the vertical profile of the model domains and will require extensive testing.

We will describe the current capabilities of WRF Portal that are necessary to support DTC activities. We will also demonstrate the flexibility of WRF Portal in defining tasks, building workflows, configuring model runs, and monitoring the runs for tens to hundreds of tasks on the NOAA Boulder - High Performance Computing System. Finally, we will describe where future development is planned to incorporate distributed data access, improved task management capabilities, and proposed extensions to the portal in order to support other weather and climate models.