Unified Forecast System (UFS) Medium-Range Weather (MRW) Application Users' Training

The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC), in cooperation with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from NOAA's Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), as well as NCAR’s Climate and Global Dynamics (CGD) Laboratory, hosted a live, virtual training session for the Unified Forecast System (UFS) Medium-Range Weather (MRW) Application from November 4-6 and November 9, 2020. This training focused on teaching community users how to set up and run the latest officially released MRW Application (version 1.1) for their own experiments, with some optional material on the last day of the training session for developers who wished to modify codes and contribute their changes back to the community code repository. The MRW Application targets predictions of global atmospheric behavior out to about two weeks; more details on the first MRW App release can be found here.

Attendees were presented with live lectures from experts on the various UFS components, including the CIME-based workflow, the atmospheric model FV3 dynamic core and physics suite options, and pre/post-processing. In addition to lectures, live virtual practice sessions were hosted to gain experience with building, running, and modifying the system to take full advantage of the supported capabilities for research and forecasting use. Participants were able to ask questions and interact with SMEs to gain a deeper understanding of the system and how to configure it for their purposes. The final day provided an optional "deeper dive" into the system for developers to cover advanced subjects, including code modification, domain configuration, and repository management protocols.