The NOAA Earth Prediction Innovation Center announces two new test cases for the Unified Forecast System (UFS) Weather Model (WM) baselines: an idealized dry baroclinic wave case and a July 2020 Convective Available Potential Energy (CAPE) case study, both in atmosphere-only configurations. Integrated into the new developmental testing framework, these tests allow users to evaluate model configuration changes in simplified setups. The 2020 CAPE case demonstrates the use of user-generated Global Forecast System (GFS) initial conditions for running a UFS WM atmosphere-only configuration. These tests are easy to run on all Tier-1 platforms and via a downloadable container, with GNU testing available on Hercules and Hera. Basic visualization options are also provided. The integration of these tests supports hierarchical system development (HSD) within the UFS, which has been enabled through the implementation of the aforementioned developmental testing framework.
The idealized baroclinic wave case (C192 resolution, 127 vertical levels) follows the Jablonowski and Williamson (2006) test and is provided by Xiaqiong Zhou of NOAA Environmental Modeling Center (EMC). The July 2020 CAPE case (C48 resolution, 127 vertical levels) mirrors a case study from the UFS Weather Model, (developed by the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC)). It utilizes the FV3_GFS_v16 CCPP physics suite and runs with GFS input data for 2020-07-23 0z generated via UFS_UTILS / chgres_cube. Input and fix file data for each case is available for download via an S3 bucket.
Users can find more information about the case configurations and how to run them on Tier-1 platforms and via container in the updated UFS WM User’s Guide.
