Developing Next-Generation Physics for UFS Applications: The Microphysics Parameterization Challenges

As the Unified Forecast System (UFS) has become available to both research and operation communities for applications, and its further development is underway, it is timely for the UFS steering committee Physics Working Group to start organizing annual UFS Physics Workshops to discuss the latest advancements in physical parameterization research and development. The expected outcome of these workshops is scientific and technical guidance for future UFS physics development and implementation to address research and operational needs of the UFS community, as well as the numerical weather prediction (NWP) community at large.

This presentation summarizes the outcome of the first Annual UFS Physics Workshop series. This first workshop features presentations on state-of-the-art research and development that address questions about how to best parameterize microphysical processes of clouds and precipitation and represent their dynamical impact across an increasing range of UFS and NWP applications, from global to convective scales. This presentation will summarize the workshop findings including the scientific and technical recommendations that address key challenges for microphysics parameterizations and future directions for development of these parameterizations for the UFS, and more broadly NWP models in the community.