WRF Preprocessing System Version 3.8: Updates

WPS Version 3.8

Version 3.8 of the WRF Pre-Processing System (WPS) was released on 8 April 2016.

The V3 WRF model is NOT backward cmpatible with old V2 input files. One must rerun WPS to generate data for real/wrf.

Also see 'Known Problems' in this release.

New features:

• The default data sources for the HGT_M, LANDUSEF/LU_INDEX, and GREENFRAC fields have been updated in v3.8 for ARW:
  
  * HGT_M now defaults to 30-arc-second USGS GMTED2010
  * GREENFRAC now defaults to MODIS FPAR
  * LU_INDEX/LANDUSEF now defaults to 21-class IGBP MODIS.
  
  For information on how to recover the behavior of v3.7.1 and earlier, see the notes in the example namelist.wps files included with the WPS source code. The GMTED2010 data have been reformatted for use with the WPS, and voids over Lake Superior and the Caspian Sea have been filled (thanks to Peter Lauritzen, NCAR). More information on the GMTED2010 data is available at http://topotools.cr.usgs.gov/gmted_viewer/ .

• New fields XLAT_C and XLONG_C have been added to geogrid output to provide the latitude and longitude of grid cell corners. These fields are useful for describing the bounds of cells in conservative remapping (e.g., using ESMF).

• The GFSENS Vtable has been updated to account for the soil temperature changes made on 2 December 2015. The GEFS and GFS now have the same TSOIL fields.

• To support the new NCEP SREF files (21 October 2015), Vtable.SREF has been added.

• A new optional keyword 'filename_digits' to be used in 'index' metadata files of geogrid static datasets has been added. This keyword enables support for static datasets with more than 99,999 (but less than 1,000,000) points along a coordinate direction.

• This release also includes several changes to the configure.defaults file:
  
  * Add a new stanza for PGI that uses the -f90=pgf90 and -cc=pgcc syntax for DM build
  * Modify the Darwin Intel gfortran stanza to include DM_FC or DM_CC macros for DM build
  * Add a new stanza for Darwin gfortran/clang

New terrestrial data sets:

• 30-arc-second USGS GMTED2010

Bug fixes:

• Fix A bug in the check for 'halt_on_missing' for categorical fields has been fixed in the geogrid program; thanks to Dazhong Yin (CARB).