CCPP SCM Version 7.0.1

The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is pleased to announce the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) Single-Column Model (SCM) v7.0.1 public release on June 30, 2025. This minor release includes updates to the CCPP SCM, a simple host model that employs the CCPP Physics and CCPP Framework. The CCPP Physics and CCPP Framework remain at v7.0.0 with no changes since the previous release. The SCM v7.0.1 is compatible with these components and includes enhancements and fixes specific to the SCM. Additional information and access to the code can be found here.

The CCPP SCM includes the following updates:

• Enhanced UFS case generation tools: Added functionality to support specifying i, j grid indices (from the FV3 native grid) along with a tile number in UFS_case_gen.py to generate single-column cases. Also added the ability to accept a list of i, j indices for batch generation of multiple cases.
• Fix area logic in the SCM: Corrected assignment of the column area from the DEPHY forcing file by removing the dependency on surface forcing LSM. Also allow the column_area in the configuration namelist to override the DEPHY assignment.
• Use of standardized missing values: Replaced hard coded missing values, -9999.0 and -9999, with the _FillValue or missing value attributes defined in the NetCDF variables.
• Enhanced documentation for 1) using the DEPHY converter script, which converts forcing files from the legacy format to the DEPHY v1.0 format, and 2) including expected behavior of the Near-Surface Sea Temperature (NSST) scheme within the SCM.
• Added support for NOAA’s Ursa platform using spack-stack v1.9.1

For access to the SCM and CCPP code and documentation, please visit the CCPP website at https://dtcenter.org/ccpp, where you will find a Users’ Guide, a list of known issues, frequently-asked questions, technical documentation, and scientific documentation. For information about the UFS please visit https://ufs.epic.noaa.gov/. 

For questions or comments about the CCPP and the SCM, please use our Github discussions at https://github.com/NCAR/ccpp-physics/discussions. When using CCPP with the UFS, you can also direct your questions to the UFS Github discussions.

We would like to acknowledge the scientific community for their valuable contributions, which informed several of the improvements in this release. 

DTC CCPP team (Ligia Bernardet, Lulin Xue, Dustin Swales, Grant Firl, Man Zhang, Mike Kavulich, Weiwei Li, Soren Rasmussen, Tracy Hertneky, Samuel Trahan, Mike Ek, and Jimy Dudhia)