EOMF-08. Case Studies with the Unified Forecast System Limited Area Configuration

Abstract
The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) released the limited area configuration of the Unified Forecast System (UFS) to the public in March 2021 as the Short-Range Weather (SRWeather) app v1.0.0. It is the foundation for building NOAA’s future convection-allowing Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS). In this study, we adopt the SRWeather app v1.0.0 to investigate the representative cases (https://ufs-case-studies.readthedocs.io/en/develop/) developed as part of the UFS Case Studies project, which until now has been restricted to using the global configuration of the UFS. The limited area configuration needs less computer resources and can run models in high resolution and refresh rapidly. Thus the case studies with the SRWeather App v1.0.0 will be a useful supplement for the global configuration case studies. The catalog of test cases currently contains 10 cases that cover known biases of the GFS operational implementations v15 and v16, such as hurricanes, mid-latitude storms, heat waves and cold blast events, and a cold air damming case. The physics suites used in this study include the v15, v16, and RRFS suites. The results from UFS SRWeather App v1.0.0 are compared with the results from the UFS global configuration. Our results suggest that the spatial pattern in the 2-meter surface temperature field from the SRWeather App v1.0.0 has slight improvements over the global model configurations. More detailed comparisons will be reported in this poster.