Introduction

WRF-GC (Lin et al., 2020; Feng et al., 2020) is a new, online coupled model based on the the regional meteorology model, WRF, and the chemical transport model, GEOS-Chem. The coupling structure is designed to be easy to use, massively parallel, and ready for the future. In particular, either one of the two parent models to be updated independently. This allows WRF-GC to take full advantage of the updates in WRF and GEOS-Chem, respectively, and stay state-of-the-science.

Architectural overview of the WRF-GC model (v1.0). The WRF-GC Coupler (all parts shown in red) includes interfaces to the two parent models, as well as the state conversion and state management modules. The parent models (shown in grey) are standard codes downloaded from their sources, without any modifications. From Lin et al. (2020).

The development of WRF-GC was led by Haipeng LIN, Xu FENG, and Tzung-May FU. In addition, the GEOS-Chem Support Team provided valuable assistance in updating the GEOS-Chem code to accommodate the coupling.

Reference

Lin, H., Feng, X., Fu, T.-M.*, Tian, H., Ma, Y., Zhang, L., Jacob, D.J., Yantosca, R.M., Sulprizio, M.P., Lundgren, E.W., Zhuang, J., Zhang, Q., Lu, X., Zhang, L., Shen, L., Guo, J., Eastham, S.D., Keller, C.A. (2020), WRF-GC (v1.0): online coupling of WRF (v3.9.1.1) and GEOS-Chem (v12.2.1) for regional atmospheric chemistry modeling – Part 1: Description of the one-way model, Geosci. Model Dev., doi:10.5194/gmd-13-3241-2020, Full text
Feng, X., Lin, H., and Fu, T.-M.* (2020), WRF-GC: online two-way coupling of WRF and GEOS-Chem for regional atmospheric chemistry modeling, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-5165, doi:10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-5165. Link.

Version history

The first version of WRF-GC (v1.0) (Lin et al., 2020) was released on January 4, 2019. A more mature and stable version (v 1.0) was released in Fall 2019. This is the current version.

A few notes about the current version (v 1.0):

The coupling between WRF and GEOS-Chem is one-way only, i.e., there is no feedback from GEOS-Chem to WRF.
The nested domain capability of WRF is not yet supported.

WRF-GC v 2.0 (Feng et al., 2020), including two-way coupling (chemistry feedback to meteorology) and nested-grid capability is near-mature and will be released in late 2020.

Obtaining the code

If you are interested in downloading WRF-GC and and giving it a spin, please send us an email (fuzm AT sustech DOT edu DOT cn) and tell us your name, affiliation, and intended general application. We will add you to a mailing list and keep you updated on new version releases.