MPAS-Atmosphere 
2016 Convection
Forecast Experiment


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The MPAS group in MMM/NCAR is performing a real-time convection prediction experiment with MPAS-Atmosphere from 26 April to  31 May 2016 in support of the NOAA/HWT Spring Experiment.  We are producing daily 5 day forecasts initialized at 00 UTC from the operational GFS analysis.

The forecasts are using 15-3 km variable-resolution that places the 3 km cell spacing over North America. The mesh spacing is depicted below. 

Mesh used for the Spring Experiment forecasts
MPAS_conv_exp_15-3_mesh
The physics used in these forecasts, taken from the WRF model, are

Surface Layer: module_sf_mynn.F as in WRF 3.5.
PBL: Mellor-Yamada-Nakanishi-Niino (MYNN) as in WRF 3.8.
Land Surface Model (NOAH 4-layers): as in WRF 3.6.1.
Gravity Wave Drag: none
Convection:  Grell-Freitas scale aware scheme (modified from WRF 3.6.1)
Microphysics: Thompson scheme (non-aeosol aware): as in WRF 3.8
Radiation: RRTMG sw as in WRF 3.4.1;  RRTMG lw as in WRF 3.4.1