P30  Leveraging WRF-ARW for High-Resolution Climatology

Hamilton, Jeff, Air Force Weather Agency

The Advanced Climate Modeling and Environmental Simulations (ACMES) program was developed in the late 1990s to provide high resolution modeled climatologies and realistic weather scenarios for data sparse areas of the world. Initially, ACMES was was initialized with the Mesoscale Atmospheric Simulation System (MASS) model, but for the past 3 years the WRF-ARW has been the core NWP tool in use.

Utilizing the NCEP Reanalysis 2 dataset for initial and boundary conditions, the model is run out 18 hours and reinitialized every 12 hours. This is done until 10 years of data has been produced. Currently, domains of various sizes are generated at 45 and 15km resolution.

The ACMES program will soon be replaced by the Retrospective WRF (Re-WRF) program. This updated system will utilize CFSR reanalysis data for initial and boundary conditions, replace legacy post-processing and statistical generation within ACMES, and implement the spectral nudging technique in WRF-ARW. This will ensure flexibility in statistical parameter calculation and computational efficiency in the generation of modeled climatological datasets.