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.