WRF-GC news

Introduction

WRF-GC 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 can 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.

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

An alpha version of WRF-GC (version 0.1) will be released on January 1st, 2019. This is intended to be a test version for interested users to get their hands dirty with WRF-GC and provide feedback to the development team. A beta release is planned for May 2019.

A few notes about the alpha version:

• So far, the coupling between WRF and GEOS-Chem is one-way only, i.e., there is no feedback from GEOS-Chem to WRF yet. We are working a two-way coupled version.
• The nested domain capability of WRF is not yet supported. This is a high-priority item that we hope to resolve in the beta version.

If you are interested in downloading WRF-GC and and giving it a spin, please send us an email (tmfu AT pku 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.