Release date: October 06, 2020
The UFS Medium-Range Application v1.1.0 was publicly released on 10/06/2020. This is a minor release of the system that predicts atmospheric behavior out to about two weeks. New capabilities in this release include the ability to ingest GFS raw initial conditions in netCDF format (to be introduced with GFSv16), flexibility to customize the post processor output, and safeguards against occasional extreme sea surface temperatures present in the initial conditions. This release is compatible with Python 3 and with recent computational system updates for all preconfigured platforms. Updated documentation and codes can be found at https://epic.noaa.gov/get-code/medium-range-weather/.
The Unified Forecast System (UFS) Medium-Range Weather Application v1.1.0 public release contains the following upgrades:
Preprocessor
- Ability to ingest GFS raw initial conditions in netCDF format.
- Upper and lower limits on sea surface temperatures (SSTs) to constrain extreme values introduced by interpolating coarser resolution GRIB2 data to model grids. These incorrect temperatures appear in the GRIB2 files as a result of not taking the land-sea mask into consideration when interpolating SST from the gaussian grid used in the output of the GFS forecast model to the latitude-longitude grid contained in the GRIB2 files.
Forecast model
- Reduction of second-order damping in the two top-most model layers for improved predictions when using CompSet GFSv16beta (new values d2_bg_k1=0.15, d2_bg_k2=0.02 in namelist).
- CCPP upgraded for compatibility with Python 3.
Postprocessor
- Flexibility to customize the variables in the output.
Workflow, build system and portability
- Compatibility with Python 3.
- Compatibility with recent system updates in all preconfigured platforms.
- Updated CIME interface for unification with other UFS Apps.
For a full description of the capabilities of this release, please refer to the App v1.1.0 release description.
