WORKING GROUP 3: STANDARD INITIALIZATION PROCEDURES

Representatives:

Mission:

The mission of this Working Group is to provide basic initialization, lower boundary fields, and lateral boundary grids to the WRF model, in the WRF file format, on the WRF horizontal and vertical coordinate.  The code handles NCEP's grib-formatted AVN and Eta model data, because that source is the most familiar and widely-available live data feed for most of the WRF development community, but it is straightforward to use other grib-formatted datasets such as the NCAR/NCEP Reanalysis archive (see README).

Status:

The WRF SI software package, as developed by Brent Shaw, John Smart, and Paul Schultz of FSL, consists of a perl script (wrfsi.pl) which coordinates four Fortran90 programs that:
1) preprocess the grib-formatted AVN and Eta grids,
2) create the lat/lon, dx/dy, topo, and other "static" fields,
3) create grids of vegatation, land use, soil type, etc. as needed for the Land Surface Module (LSM),
3) perform horizontal interpolation from the source-grid coordinate to the WRF coordinate, and
4) do the vertical interpolation.
The code is provided in a tarfile that is available to the WRF community.  We have worked very hard to provide a complete README, solid "make" scripts, install scripts, and other convenience and portability features, but suggestions for improving it are always welcome.  The tarfile is available via ftp://ftp.fsl.noaa.gov/pub/frd-laps.

Plans:

The SI group is in the process of developing a graphical user interface (GUI) for the WRF model.  The GUI will allow the user to pick an area from a map of the globe and make subsequent entries to specify grid location and dimensions, source and destination directories, model physics options, etc.  The first release of the GUI was demonstrated at the August 2002 WRF community meeting.

Known future needs:

1)  SI code parallelization to handle very large grids,
2)  initialization of nests,
3)  additional surface fields for the LSM, and
4)  initialization of condensate fields for diabatic initialization.

Interaction with other WRF Groups:

The SI group is working with the Software Architecture and Numerics/Dynamics groups on initialization and lateral boundary conditions, WRF metadata, and implementation of the API.

Last update:  7 September 2002 by Paul Schultz