11.2 A New Hydrological Model Extension Package for the Weather Research and Forecasting System

Gochis, David, W. Yu, D. Yates,  R. Rasmussen, and M. Clark, National Center for Atmopsheric Research, H. Kunstmann, T. Rummler, and B. Fersch, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Over the last several years researchers from NCAR and the academic community have been making steady progress on developing a generic model-coupling framework for the regional Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) to enable rapid, extensible integration of distributed hydrologic models within the WRF modeling platform.  The emerging coupling framework is a multi-model development and integration effort that leverages the modular, parallel computing architecture of the WRF.  Effectively, we have developed a model driver/coupling architecture that enables the coupling of many different conceptualizations of the land surface including plant canopy formulations, terrestrial routing and groundwater formulations, and water management infrastructure formulations into WRF. The system has seamless stand-alone (i.e. offline) and coupled capabilities, is high performance computing (HPC) capable, is readily extensible and upgradable and is completely open source, distributed through NCAR to the academic community. The hydrological model extension package is scheduled to be released with the next version of WRF in 2013 as a separate extension package akin to ÔWRF-ChemÕ.  This presentation will provide a structural overview of the new software package and provide results from several case study applications ranging from idealized experiments to real-world, coupled model forecast runs.