Short Range Weather Application - Earth Prediction Innovation Center

Short Range Weather Application - Earth Prediction Innovation Center
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Short-Range Weather (SRW) Application
On This Page:
Getting Started
Documentation & User Support
Releases
Developer Info
Other Links
Welcome
The Unified Forecast System (UFS) is a community-based, coupled, comprehensive Earth modeling system. NOAA’s operational model suite for numerical weather prediction (NWP) is quickly transitioning to the UFS from a number of different modeling systems. The UFS enables research, development, and contribution opportunities within the broader Weather Enterprise (including government, industry, and academia). For more information about the UFS, visit the
UFS
Portal
Description
The Unified Forecast System (UFS) includes
multiple applications
that support different forecast timescales and spatial domains. This page primarily describes the development branch of the UFS Short-Range Weather (SRW) Application (App), which targets predictions of atmospheric behavior on a limited spatial domain and on
timescales
from minutes to several days. The development branch of the SRW App is continually evolving as the system undergoes open development. The latest SRW App release (v3.0.0) represents a snapshot of this continuously evolving system.
For any publications based on work with the UFS SRW App, please include a
citation with the DOI
below:
UFS Development Team.
(2025, Apr. 9th).
Unified Forecast System (UFS) Short-Range Weather (SRW) Application (Version v3.0.0).
Zenodo
Getting Started
Before running the
SRW App
, users should determine which of the four
levels of support
is applicable to their system. Generally, Level 1 & 2 systems are restricted to those with access through National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its affiliates. These systems are named (e.g., Hera, Orion, Derecho). Level 3 & 4 systems include certain personal computers or non-NOAA-affiliated High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems.
The
Quick Start Chapter
provided in the v3.0.0
User’s Guide
is an excellent place for new users to begin. It provides details on how to clone the SRW App, build it, and run a forecast. The
Tutorials
cha
pter is also a good place to start. It walks users through different SRW App experiment cases and analyzes these test cases results.
GET CODE
Documentation & User Support
The SRW App User’s Guide has the most comprehensive information on the SRW App, including links to more thorough technical documentation for its components. Users may need different versions of the User’s Guide depending on their goals:
Version
Description
Develop Branch
Documentation for the develop branch. This may have gaps and errors.
Release v3.0.0
Documentation for the most recent release (v3.0.0).
Release v2.2.0
Documentation for the most recent release (v2.2.0).
Release v2.1.0
Documentation for the v2.1.0 release.
Users can also get expert help through the
GitHub Discussions Q&A
Developer Support
The
SRW App Hierarchical Repository Structure
page provides information on the SRW App structure, its submodules, and points of contact for each.
The
Code Contributor’s Guide
describes how to contribute and test code for the
ufs-srweather-app
repository.
The
Code Manager’s Guide
provides information on how to review pull requests (PRs).
Developers wanting to move development from forks of the old
regional_workflow
repository can find information
on this page
Releases
The latest release of the SRW App is v3.0.0. See the
Releases
page for more information on current and past releases.
UFS Short-Range Weather Application 3.0.0
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
UFS Short-Range Weather Application 2.2.0
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.
Documentation:
GitHub Wiki
GitHub Repository
Users Guide
UFS Short-Range Weather Application 2.1.0
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
UFS Short-Range Weather Application 2.0.0
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.
Documentation:
GitHub Wiki
GitHub Repository
Users Guide
Other Links
The
spack-stack
repository
contains the prerequisite software needed to run the SRW App and other UFS software. This software is preinstalled on
Level 1 systems
(e.g., Hera, Orion, Derecho). Users can view the
spack-stack
documentation
to install it on other systems.
SRW App Data Bucket
: Get downloadable data to run supported SRW App cases.
NOAA EPIC Docker Hub
: A repository of container images (including SRW App container images) that users can download. The SRW App containers package the SRW App together with all its software dependencies for an easier experience building and running the App.
UFS SRW App README.md
file
Get Started With the SRW App Repository
GitHub Code
Supported Systems
Resources
User’s Guide
Q&A Forum
SRW App wiki
Technical FAQs
Tutorials
Public Release Code
v3.0.0 (latest)
v2.2.0
v2.1.0
All releases
For Developers
UFS-AQM Community Version
SRW: Simulating the August 10, 2020 Derecho
SRW App Repo Structure
Code Contributor’s Guide
Code Manager’s Guide
Useful Links
pack-stack
SRW App Data Bucket
NOAA EPIC DockerHub
SRW App README.md
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