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.