Unified Forecast System (UFS) Short-Range Weather (SRW) Application Users' Training

The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC), in cooperation with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from NOAA's Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL), and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), hosted a live, virtual training session for the Unified Forecast System (UFS) Short-Range Weather (SRW) Application from September 20-24, 2021. This training focused on teaching community users how to set up and run the first officially released SRW Application for their own experiments. The SRW Application targets predictions of regional atmospheric behavior out to several days; more details on the first SRW App release can be found here.

Attendees were presented with live lectures from experts on the various UFS components, including the regional workflow, NCEP libraries, the FV3 dynamic core and limited area model (LAM) configuration, physics suite options, pre/post-processing, and Python plotting scripts to visualize output. Additional lectures on current and future development of the SRW App were also planned. Live virtual hands-on 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. In addition, a "deeper dive" into the system to cover advanced subjects, such as Git/GitHub overview, domain configuration, code modifications, and repository management protocols were provided.