Short-Range Weather (SRW) Application

Release Date: 04/09/2025 

Release Description: The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) and the Unified Forecast System (UFS) community are proud to announce the public release of the Short-Range Weather (SRW) Application (App) v3.0.0. This release is an update to the v2.2.0 release from October 2023 and reflects a number of changes currently available in the SRW App develop 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:

• Integration of Community Fire Behavior Model, developed by the CFBM group at NSF-NCAR:
  • Enabled fire simulation on a very high-resolution fire modeling grid nested within the atmospheric domain
  • Updated documentation and workflow end-to-end (WE2E) test to reflect the two-way coupling feature
• Integration of Smoke and Dust (SD) Capabilities to the SRW App develop branch
  • Added a new SD WE2E test, a sample configuration YAML file (config.smoke_dust.yaml), and a separate Conda environment (sd_environment.yml)
  • Added the FV3_HRRR_gf physics suite for SD capabilities
  • Ported SD features to all Tier-1 platforms
  • Completed various SD-related script updates and bug fixes
  • Integration of verification options for smoke and dust forecast fields
• Miscellaneous enhancements, including:
  • Physical parameterizations: UFS Weather Model updated with the latest developments in physical parameterizations. Includes the RRFS_sas physics suite for the Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) v1. RRFS v1 is a high-resolution limited-area NOAA developmental model being proposed for operational implementation at the National Weather Service.
  • Newly added/supported grids: The SUBCONUS_CO_3km (3km grid over Colorado) and SUBCONUS_CO_1km (1km grid over Colorado) predefined grids were created for UFS FIRE but can be used by any experiments
  • Verification (VX): Simplified verification tasks, improved METplus configuration, and added the MET_ensemble_verification_winter_wx test
  • Workflow: Added option to install Miniforge for SRW environments (srw_app, srw_graphics, srw_aqm); replaced Unified Workflow (UW) CLI with API calls in Python scripts.
  • Data: Reorganized S3 data bucket structure for better versioning and data management
  • Graphics: Improved plotting for better visibility and ensemble outputs
  • Testing & CI/CD: Improved Jenkinsfile handling, skill-score metrics, and platform node skipping; added remaining UFS case studies as WE2E tests.
  • Dependencies: Upgraded SRW App to spack-stack 1.6.0
  • Updated UFS Weather Model and component hashes
  • Miscellaneous bug fixes since the SRW App v2.2.0 release, including issues related to verification, CI/CD, cloud instances, and dependencies.
• Documentation updates and enhancements:
  • Documentation for fire and SD capabilities
  • Addition of technical documentation and documentation testing via GitHub Actions
  • New tutorials:
    • Halloween Storm with METplus verification
    • Gulf Coast Blizzard with public data and user-defined grid
• Updated container for the v3.0.0 release

The v3.0.0 User’s Guide 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 in the SRW App data bucket). Interested users can get support by submitting a question through the GitHub Discussions Q & A page.

Documentation:

• GitHub Wiki
• GitHub Repository
• Users Guide

Release Date: 10/31/2023

Release Description: The SRW Application v2.2.0 includes a prognostic atmospheric model, pre- and post-processing, and a community workflow for running the system end-to-end. These components are documented within this User’s Guide and supported through GitHub Discussions. New and improved capabilities for this release include:

• Addition of the supported FV3_RAP physics suite and support for the RRFS_NA_13km predefined grid
• Addition of FV3_GFS_v17_p8 physics suite
• Updates to CCPP that target the top of the main branch (see description of changes)
• Expansion of Level 1 platforms to include Derecho, Hercules, and Gaea C5
• Transition to spack-stack modulefiles for most supported platforms to align with the UFS WM shift to spack-stack
• Overhaul of WE2E testing suite 
• Improvements to the CI/CD automated testing pipeline 
• Incorporation of additional METplus verification capabilities
• Integration of the Unified Workflow’s templater tool
• Ability to create a user-defined custom workflow
• Option to use a custom vertical coordinate file with different distribution of vertical layers
• Incorporation of plotting tasks into the workflow; addition of ability to plot on both CONUS and smaller regional grid
• Addition of a sample verification case
• A new tutorial chapter in the documentation
• Incorporation of UFS Case Studies within the WE2E framework
• Air Quality Modeling (AQM) capabilities (unsupported but available)
• Miscellaneous documentation updates to reflect the changes above

Future work will expand the capabilities of the application to include data assimilation (DA) and a forecast restart/cycling capability.

Release Date: 11/17/2022

Release Description:

The SRW Application v2.1.0 includes a prognostic atmospheric model, pre- and post-processing, and a community workflow for running the system end-to-end. These components are documented within this User’s Guide and supported through GitHub Discussions. New and improved capabilities for this release include:

• 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

Future work will expand the capabilities of the application to include data assimilation (DA) and a forecast restart/cycling capability.

Documentation:

• GitHub Wiki
• GitHub Repository
• Users Guide

Release Date: 06/23/2022

Release Description: The SRW Application v2.0.0 includes a prognostic atmospheric model, pre- and post-processing, and a community workflow for running the system end-to-end. These components are documented within this User’s Guide and supported through a community forum (https://forums.ufscommunity.org/). New and improved capabilities for this release include the addition of a verification package (METplus) for both deterministic and ensemble simulations and support for four Stochastically Perturbed Perturbation (SPP) schemes. Future work will expand the capabilities of the application to include data assimilation (DA) and a forecast restart/cycling capability.