Announcement: UFS Short-Range Weather Application (SRW App) v3.0.0 Released on 4/9/2025

[jdkublnick]

The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) and the Unified Forecast System (UFS) community are proud to announce the public release of the Short-Range Weather (SRW) Application (App) v3.0.0, more information is available via the EPIC SRW Get Code Page. This release is an update to the v2.2.0 release from October 2023 and reflects a number of changes currently available in the SRW App develop branch. The Application is designed for short-range (up to two days) regional forecasts located anywhere on the globe. The new release includes the following updates:

• Integration of Community Fire Behavior Model, developed by the CFBM group at NSF-NCAR:
  • Enabled fire simulation on a very high-resolution fire modeling grid nested within the atmospheric domain
  • Updated documentation and workflow end-to-end (WE2E) test to reflect the two-way coupling feature
• Integration of Smoke and Dust (SD) Capabilities to the SRW App develop branch
  • Added a new SD WE2E test, a sample configuration YAML file (config.smoke_dust.yaml), and a separate Conda environment (sd_environment.yml)
  • Added the FV3_HRRR_gf physics suite for SD capabilities
  • Ported SD features to all Tier-1 platforms
  • Completed various SD-related script updates and bug fixes
  • Integration of verification options for smoke and dust forecast fields
• Miscellaneous enhancements, including:
  • Physical parameterizations: UFS Weather Model updated with the latest developments in physical parameterizations. Includes the RRFS_sas physics suite for the Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) v1. RRFS v1 is a high-resolution limited-area NOAA developmental model being proposed for operational implementation at the National Weather Service.
  • Newly added/supported grids: The SUBCONUS_CO_3km (3km grid over Colorado) and SUBCONUS_CO_1km (1km grid over Colorado) predefined grids were created for UFS FIRE but can be used by any experiments
  • Verification (VX): Simplified verification tasks, improved METplus configuration, and added the MET_ensemble_verification_winter_wx test
  • Workflow: Added option to install Miniforge for SRW environments (srw_app, srw_graphics, srw_aqm); replaced Unified Workflow (UW) CLI with API calls in Python scripts.
  • Data: Reorganized S3 data bucket structure for better versioning and data management
  • Graphics: Improved plotting for better visibility and ensemble outputs
  • Testing & CI/CD: Improved Jenkinsfile handling, skill-score metrics, and platform node skipping; added remaining UFS case studies as WE2E tests.
  • Dependencies: Upgraded SRW App to spack-stack 1.6.0
  • Updated UFS Weather Model and component hashes
  • Miscellaneous bug fixes since the SRW App v2.2.0 release, including issues related to verification, CI/CD, cloud instances, and dependencies.
• Documentation updates and enhancements:
  • Documentation for fire and SD capabilities
  • Addition of technical documentation and documentation testing via GitHub Actions
  • New tutorials:
    • Halloween Storm with METplus verification
    • Gulf Coast Blizzard with public data and user-defined grid
• Updated container for the v3.0.0 release

The v3.0.0 User's Guide has been updated to reflect these improvements to the Application, and numerous test cases with all associated data files are also available to the public in the SRW App data bucket). Interested users can get support by submitting a question through the GitHub Discussions Q & A page.

For more information about this release, including contributors, see the full article on the EPIC website!