News

UFS Short-Range Weather Application v2.1.0 Release

The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) and the Unified Forecast System (UFS) community are proud to announce the public release of the UFS Short-Range Weather (UFS SRW) Application version 2.1.0. This release is an update to the version 2.0.0 release from June 2022 and reflects a number of changes currently available at the head of the UFS SRW development branch. The Application is designed for short-range (up to two days) regional forecasts located anywhere on the globe. The new release includes the following updates:

  • Conversion to a Python workflow (from the former shell workflow)
  • Improved container support, including the option to run across compute nodes using Rocoto
  • Updates to physical parameterizations within the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) (see detailed description here)
  • Support for the Unified Post Processor (UPP) to be run inline
  • Addition of a multi-purpose code clean-up script (devclean.sh)
  • Improved support for the METplus verification suite

The User’s Guide, available here, has been updated to reflect these improvements to the Application, and numerous test cases with all associated data files are also available to the public here. Interested users can get support by submitting a question through GitHub Discussions.

As detailed in the User’s Guide, the SRW Application is highly portable with detailed instructions describing how to build and run on a wide variety of platforms, including Ubuntu Linux and MacOS. Additionally, Docker images containing the full software stack and pre-built SRW Application are available for download or conversion to Singularity containers. The containers can be used to run through the full workflow on any high-performance computing system that has Intel MPI, Rocoto, Singularity, and Miniconda installed.

This v2.1.0 release comes five months after the SRW Application Release Working Group deployed v2.0.0. This accelerated release timeline demonstrates the modernization of the UFS release process from a static release to a continuous release paradigm. This new paradigm seeks to provide users with public releases issued from the same code repository that contains the latest developmental code. This code is used for research and development and is consistent with future operational implementations. The SRW Application Release Working Group includes members from NOAA laboratories, centers and programs, cooperative institutes, and community partners — notably the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC), the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC), the Global Systems Laboratory (GSL), the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL)the Environmental Modeling Center (EMC),  the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and NOAA Open Data Dissemination (NODD). Future work will expand the capabilities of the Application to include data assimilation (DA) and a forecast restart/cycling capability.

Features integrated into this releases were funded by NOAA Weather Program office’s EPIC and Joint Technology Transfer Initiative (JTTI) Programs, National Weather Service Office of Science and Technology Integration (OSTI) Modeling Programs, and the NOAA Disaster Supplemental Program.