Overview

The primary purpose of WFIP2 Model Development Team is to improve existing numerical weather prediction models in a manner that leads to improved wind forecasts in regions of complex terrain. Improvements in the models will come through better understanding of the physics associated with the wind flow in and around the wind plant across a range of temporal and spatial scales, which will be gained through WFIP2’s observational field study and analysis.

Data Details

Initial conditions, lateral-boundary conditions, WRF namelists, and output graphics were archived from three real-time modeling frameworks: 1) RAP-ESRL: the experimental RAP (run hourly) 2) HRRR-ESRL: the experimental HRRR (run hourly) 3) HRRR-WFIP2: the experimental, WFIP2-provisional version of the HRRR, run twice daily at 0600 and 1800 UTC. The real-time HRRR-WFIP2 also ran with a concurrent 750-m nest (i.e., the HRRR-WFIP2 nest) that was initialized at 1 h into the HRRR forecast (i.e., 0700 and 1900 UTC).

Each of these frameworks should be considered experimental, subject to intermittent production outages (sometimes persistent), data-assimilation outages, and changes to data-assimilation procedures and physical parameterizations.

The archive of real-time data from these modeling frameworks consists of the following two zip-file aggregations: 1) files containing initial conditions, lateral boundary conditions, and WRF namelists: For RAP-ESRL and HRRR-ESRL runs, three files are compressed in a single zip file: i) wrfinput_d01: initial conditions (netCDF) ii) wrfbdy_d01: lateral-boundary conditions (netCDF) iii) namelist.input: the WRF-ARW namelist (plain text) The HRRR-WFIP2 archive also includes these files, but with the addition of "wrfinput_d02", the nested-domain initial conditions (netCDF). Note that while the archived HRRR-WFIP2 namelist specifies a 15-h forecast, lateral-boundary conditions for most runs are available for a 24-h forecast. 2) files containing output graphics (png). Given the large number of graphics files that are produced, a detailed description of the zip-file contents is not given here.