Announcement: UFS Short-Range Weather Application (SRW App) v2.2.0 Released on 10/31/2023

[gspetro-NOAA]

The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) and the Unified Forecast System (UFS) community are proud to announce the public release of the Short-Range Weather Application (SRW App) version 2.2.0. This release is an update to the version 2.1.0 release from November 2022 and reflects a number of changes currently available in the SRW App develop branch. The Application is designed for short-range (up to two days) regional forecasts located anywhere on the globe. The new release includes the following updates:

• Bug fixes since the v2.1.0 release
• Addition of the supported FV3_RAP physics suite (PR #811) and support for the RRFS_NA_13km predefined grid
• Addition of FV3_GFS_v17_p8 physics suite (PR #574)
• Updates to CCPP that target the top of the main branch (which is ahead of CCPP v6.0.0). View a detailed summary of CCPP updates that came in ahead of the SRW App v2.2.0 release.
• Expansion of Level 1 platforms to include Derecho, Hercules, and Gaea C5 (PRs #894, #898, #911)
• Transition to spack-stack modulefiles for most supported platforms to align with the UFS WM shift to spack-stack (PRs #913 and #941)
• Overhaul of WE2E testing suite (see, e.g., PRs #686, #732, #864, #871)
• Improvements to the CI/CD automated testing pipeline (see, e.g., PRs #707 and #847)
• Incorporation of additional METplus verification capabilities (PRs #552, #614, #757, #853)
• Integration of the Unified Workflow’s templater tool (PR #793)
• Ability to create a user-defined custom workflow (PR #676)
• Option to use a custom vertical coordinate file with different distribution of vertical layers (PR #813) and documentation on how to use this feature (PR #888)
• Incorporation of plotting tasks into the workflow (PR #482); addition of ability to plot on both CONUS and smaller regional grid (PR #560)
• Addition of a sample verification case (PR #500) with documentation
• A new tutorial chapter in the documentation (PR #584)
• Incorporation of UFS Case Studies within the WE2E framework (PRs #736 and #822)
• Air Quality Modeling (AQM) capabilities (unsupported but available; see PR #613)
• Miscellaneous documentation updates to reflect the changes above

The v2.2.0 User's Guide has been updated to reflect these improvements to the Application, and numerous test cases with all associated data files are also available to the public in the SRW App data bucket). Interested users can get support by submitting a question through the GitHub Discussions Q & A page.

For more information about this release, including contributors, see the full article on the EPIC website!