The Weather Research and Forecasting Model: Overview, System Efforts, and Future Directions

Abstract

Since its initial release in 2000, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model has become one of the world’s most widely used numerical weather prediction models. Designed to serve both research and operational needs, it has grown to offer a spectrum of options and capabilities for a wide range of applications. In addition, it underlies a number of tailored systems that address Earth system modeling beyond weather. While the WRF Model has a centralized support effort, it has become a truly community model, driven by the developments and contributions of an active worldwide user base. The WRF Model sees significant use for operational forecasting, and its research implementations are pushing the boundaries of finescale atmospheric simulation. Future model directions include developments in physics, exploiting emerging compute technologies, and ever-innovative applications. From its contributions to research, forecasting, educational, and commercial efforts worldwide, the WRF Model has made a significant mark on numerical weather prediction and atmospheric science.

Co‐Producing Interdisciplinary Knowledge and Action for Sustainable Water Governance: Lessons from the Development of a Water Resources Decision Support System in Pernambuco, Brazil

“…These are predictions of atmospheric variables, such as precipitation and temperature, covering the entire state of Pernambuco at 9 km spatial and 6 h temporal resolution ( Figure , domain 2). A recent development of WRF includes the WRF Hydrological Modeling Extension Package (WRF‐Hydro), which allows simulating: i) the coupled atmospheric‐land surface hydrologic processes; ii) the lateral movement of water in the surface and subsurface portions of the Earth's land mass; and iii) streamflow routing in the channel network . As such, WRF‐Hydro can be utilized to issue operational streamflow forecasts at distributed locations within the channel network directly from atmospheric predictions.…”

Sources and characteristics of summertime organic aerosol in the Colorado Front Range: perspective from measurements and WRF-Chem modeling

“…The Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with Chemistry (WRF-Chem) (https://ruc.noaa.gov/wrf/ wrf-chem/, last access: 14 January 2018) is an online meteorology-chemistry model, which is widely used in air quality and atmospheric chemistry applications (Grell et al, 2005;Powers et al, 2017). Table 1 lists the main configurations and parameterizations used to run WRF-Chem.…”

Urban Modification of Convection and Rainfall in Complex Terrain

“…Similar to prior impact studies (Castro et al, ; Fairman et al, ), paired numerical model simulations—which differ only in specification of land cover and land surface characteristics—are used to examine the impact of urbanization from San Miguel de Tucumán on local cloud and precipitation formation. The Advanced Research Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF‐ARW) is used for the modeling experiments (Powers et al, ). The WRF‐ARW is an open‐source, coupled, limited‐area, and nonhydrostatic model widely used for mesoscale modeling applications.…”