WRF Preprocessing System Version 3.5: Updates

WPS Version 3.5

Version 3.5 of the WRF Pre-Processing System (WPS) was released on 18 April 2013.

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

Also see 'Known Problems' in this release.

New terrestrial data sets:

• 40-category NLCD 2006 land use for use with LSM option 7 (PX LSM) (CONUS only; thanks to EPA)

• MODIS FPAR monthly vegetation fraction based on data from 2001 - 2010 (global; based on MODIS product MCD15A2. Thanks to Central Weather Bureau of Taiwan and M. Barlage of NCAR)

• NUDAPT urban morphology from the National Building Statistics Database (44 selected U.S. cities; thanks to T. Glotfelty and J. Ching) (Click here for details on how to use this dataset).

New features:

• Support for GRIB data on Mercator projections

• Improved checking for 32-bit or 64-bit netCDF libraries in configure script

• New Rapid Refresh Vtables, Vtable.RAP*

• New METGRID.TBL file for use with RAP data

Bug fixes:

• Corrected map projection codes in output from rd_intermediate

• Fixes to ungrib's handling of forecast hours in GRIB files

• Various small bug fixes

Other:

• Unused fields HGT_U and HGT_V have been removed from ARW GEOGRID.TBL files

• NCAR Graphics-based utilites plotfmt and plotgrids are not built by default; these can be built separately with compile plotfmt and compile plotgrids if suitable NCARG libraries are available

• Deprecated build scripts (e.g., configure_old) have been removed