Over the past several years, NOAA’s numerical weather prediction (NWP) efforts have organized around a vision of a community-based model system unification, i.e. Unified Forecast System (UFS), across domains from global to regional mesoscale to CONUS-scale convection-allowing (and ultimately cloud-resolving) forecasts. This webinar will focus on describing the development and plans for a UFS Short-Range Weather / Convection Allowing Model (CAM) application including the establishment of a stand-alone regional version of the FV3 dynamic core with extensible grid generation capabilities, an interface with both data assimilation systems and lateral boundary forcings provided from external models and an end-to-end workflow. The webinar will also highlight the plan to consolidate/replace many existing operational CAM systems with a UFS CAM application known as the Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) including metrics that will be used in the research-to-operations transition process along with physical parameterizations (suite) to be used in the RRFS. Public release(s) of the RRFS components will be described that will help facilitate community engagement in future development efforts. Finally, the webinar will describe some scientific challenges at CAM scales including documented biases in the depiction of convective-scale processes and other CAM initialization challenges.
