The Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) is a collection of physical parameterizations and a framework that enables their use by host Earth System Models. The CCPP is now an integral part of the Unified Forecast System (UFS) and is used in developmental versions of its Subseasonal-to-Seasonal, Medium-Range Weather (MRW), Short-Range Weather (SRW), Hurricane, and Atmospheric Composition applications. The CCPP is designed to lower the bar for community involvement in physics testing and development through increased interoperability, improved documentation, and continuous support to the developers and the users.
The CCPP is used with a variety of host models, which increases the breadth of innovations that can benefit the UFS. The CCPP has been adopted in developmental versions of NCAR and Navy models, and is distributed with the CCPP Single Column Model (SCM), which offers a simpler and computationally inexpensive avenue for testing and developing atmospheric physics compared to a full three-dimensional model. Given its capabilities to be initialized and forced both by observational field campaign data and previous UFS simulations, the CCPP SCM is a key element in Hierarchical System Development (HSD), which includes testing small elements (e.g. physics schemes) of an Earth System Model (ESM) first in isolation and then with progressive coupling, all the way up to fully-coupled global system. Scientists can utilize the CCPP package to rapidly develop and test prototype code, as well as to tune and explore the parameter space of their schemes.
The CCPP has been developed as open source code, with public releases and support provided by the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC). It is also embedded in public releases of the CCPP SCM and of the UFS MRW and SRW applications. Other resources for CCPP users and developers are an online tutorial, archived materials from UFS training sessions, scientific and technical documentations, a catalog of case studies that highlights UFS MRW biases, and a community forum. In this seminar, we will provide an update of the CCPP and SCM latest developments, and review the plans for CCPP future development and transition to operations.
