1. Weather Research & Forecasting: A General Overview
HPC Symposium 2014, IIT Madras
Tabish U Ansari
MS – Environmental Engineering
Department of Civil Engineering, IIT Madras

2. The WRF Model
State of the art atmospheric simulation system- portable and efficient on available parallel computing platforms
Broad range of applications across scales: Idealized simulations (LES, baroclinic waves)
Parameterization research
Data Assimilation research
Forecast research/ Realtime NWP
Hurricane research
Regional climate research
Coupled model applications
Teaching

3. Components of the WRF modelling system
The WRF preprocessing system
WRF-Var
ARW solver
Post-processing & vizualization tools

5. WPS Defining simulation domains
Interpolating terrestrial data (terrain, landuse, soil categories etc.)
Degribbing and interpolating meteorological data from another model to this simulation domain

8. WRF Solver
Several initialization programs for idealized and real data simulations and the numerical integration program
Fully compressible non hydrostatic equations
Regional and global applications
Map projection terms
Arakawa C-grid staggering
Runge kutta 2nd and 3rd order time integration options
Scalar conserving flux form for prognostic variables
2nd to 6th order advection options (horizontal and vertical)
Lateral boundary conditions
Full Physics options for Land surface, PBL, radiation, microphysics and cumulus convection
A single layer ocean mixed model

9. Post Processing

10. Supported combinations of hardware and software

11. The WRF model may be built to run on:
A single-processor machine
A shared-memory machine (that uses the OpenMP API)
A distributed memory machine (with the appropriate MPI libraries), or on a distributed cluster (utilizing both OpenMP and MPI)
The WRFDA and WPS packages run on the above-listed systems

12. Required compilers and scripting languages
The majority of the WRF model, WPS, and WRFDA codes are written in Fortran90
The software layer, RSL, which sits between WRF and WRFDA, and the MPI interface is written in C
WPS makes direct calls to the MPI libraries for distributed memory message passing
There are also ancillary programs that are written in C to perform file parsing and file construction, which are required for default building of the WRF modeling code
Additionally, the WRF build mechanism uses several scripting languages: including perl, Cshell and Bourne shell
The traditional UNIX text/file processing utilities are used: make, m4, sed, and awk

13. It’s free, check it out today!