WRF Forecast Testing

Extensive testing and evaluation of various physics options have been performed to ensure these schemes 
can realistically describe physical and dynamical process in the atmosphere. The tested schemes pull 
heavily from the new contributions from users, but the suite also includes older options to allow 
comparisons with packages whose behavior is more thoroughly known. 

The WRF ARW tests are conducted for the summer period from June 1 to June 28, 2010, and for the winter 
period from January 1 to January 28 2013.
  
- Domain Configuration:

CONUS domain with 20-km resolution, as shown in figure below.



Grid Structure:
290 x 190 horizontal grid points, covering an area of  22040000 km2
40 vertical levels with model top at 30 hPa
Lambert-Conformal map projection

- Initial and boundary conditions:
NCEP FNL Operational Model Global Tropospheric Analyses are used to provide initial 
and boundary conditions for the testing runs.  

Each single case is initialized daily at 0000UTC and run for 48-hour forecast. For both 
summer and winter, 28 cases for conducted for testing and evaluation.

- Physics options 
For each of the 28 cases, a set of physics options is tested.  The new physics options were the 
focus of the tests. These are:  HUJI SBM, Noah subgrid tiling, NSSL 2-moment, 4-ice scheme, and the Thompson aerosol climatology options 

test		CU	LW   	SW    	PBL	LSM	MP	Shallow	Aerosol
STD		1	1	2	1	2	4	NA	NA
RRTMG		1	4	4	1	2	4	NA	NA
CUGF		3	1	2	1	2	4	NA	NA
MYNN		3	1	2	1	2	4	NA	NA
SHCU		1	1	2	1	2	4	3	NA
Thompson	1	1	2	1	2	8	NA	NA
Thompson	1	1	2	1	2	28	NA	use_aero_icbc = F
Thompson	1	1	2	1	2	28	NA	use_aero_icbc = T
Lake		1	4	4	1	2	4	NA	NA
Tile		1	4	4	1	2	4	NA	NA
KFCLD		1	4	4	1	2	4	NA	NA
Aerosol		1	4	4	1	2	4	NA	aer_opt = 1
Aerosol		1	4	4	1	2	4	NA	aer_opt = 2


- Verification
All WRF results are compared with FNL surface and upper air analysis.  Domain average 
BIAS and RMSE are calculated.