Climatologies Based on the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) Model

Because tests at Army Test and Evaluation Command (ATEC) ranges can often only be conducted under specific atmospheric conditions, climatologies of each range could be a very useful tool for long-range test planning. Such datasets can provide the probability density function of near-surface wind speed, percent cloud cover, temperature, precipitation, turbulence intensity, upper-atmospheric wind speed, etc., as a function of the month of the year, time of day, and location on the range. The STAR Institute with guidance from the Ohio Supercomputer Center is working on porting the Climate Four Dimensional Data Assimilation (CFDDA) technology developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research to version 3 of the Weather and Research Forecast (WRF) model for use on systems within the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Prograf m. The fully parallelized WRF-CFDDA system uses data-assimilation by Newtonian relaxation, to generate a regional reanalysis that is consistent with both observations and model dynamics for every hour of the past 20 years, at fine scales (3 km grid) over the Dugway Proving Ground range.