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, 2015, and for the winter 
period from January 1 to January 28 2016.
  
- Domain Configuration:

CONUS domain with 15-km resolution, as shown in figure below.



Grid Structure:
401 x 261 horizontal grid points
40 vertical levels with model top at 30 hPa
Lambert-Conformal map projection

- Initial and boundary conditions:
NCEP 0.25 degree GFS analyses are used to provide the initial and boundary conditions 
for each of the testing runs.  

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

- Physics options 
For each of the 28 cases, a set of physics options is tested.  The new and modified physics 
options are:

1. v3.9 baseline test
KF, YSU, Noah, WSM5, RRTMG

2. v3.8.1 baseline
KF, YSU, Noah, WSM5, RRTMG

3. CONUS
using "conus" suite
old Tiedtke (6), MYJ PBL, surface layer, Thompson, RRTMG, aer_opt=1 (same as ensemble)

4. TROPICAL
using "tropical" suite
WSM6, New Tiedtke, RRTMG, YSU PBL, Old MM5 SFCLAY, Noah LSM

5. CU16
same as CONUS, but use new tiedtke (cu_physics=16)

6. RAP      
GF, MYNN and MYNN surface layer, RUC LSM (9 soil layers), RRTMG, Thompson (28),
aer_opt=3, cu_rad_feedback = .true., usemonalb=.true., rdlai2d=.true.

7. hybrid vertical coordinate 
same as v3.9 baseline, but use hybrid_opt=2

8. topo_wind =1
same as v3.9 baseline, but topo_wind=1

- Verification
All WRF results are initialized with and compared to 0.25 degree GFS surface and upper 
air analysis.  Domain averaged BIAS and RMSE are calculated for conventional fields.