Automated Quality Assurance Analysis: WRF-A Case Study

Powerful software tools are used by the aerospace and power generation communities to check codes for errors. The Software Validation Project at Edge Hill University (http://www.edgehill.ac.uk) in collaboration with SimCon Ltd (http://www.simconglobal.com) has applied these tools to WRF, the most widely used program for modeling climate and weather. Preliminary results have been generated. Although the WRF code has been found to be of a very high standard, some errors have been identified, both in the code and in the compilers used to build it. An aim of the project is to use CASE tools to correct some classes of error automatically. This paper discusses the classes of error that have been identified to date, presents the initial findings from the investigations performed by the project team.