CWRF Ready for Climate Service

The CWRF has been developed as the Climate extension of the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF, Skamarock et al. 2008) by incorporating numerous improvements in representation of physical processes and integration of external (top, surface, lateral) forcings that are crucial to climate scales, including interactions between land–atmosphere–ocean, convection–microphysics and cloud–aerosol–radiation, and system consistency throughout all process modules (Liang et al. 2011). This extension inherits all WRF functionalities for numerical weather prediction while enhancing the capability for climate modeling. As such, it can be applied for seamless weather forecast and climate prediction. The CWRF has been built with an unprecedentedly comprehensive ensemble of alternative parameterization schemes for each of the key physical processes, including surface (land, ocean), planetary boundary layer, cumulus (deep, shallow), microphysics, cloud, aerosol, and radiation, and their interactions. This facilitates the use of an optimized physics ensemble approach to improve weather or climate prediction along with a reliable uncertainty estimate. The CWRF also emphasizes the societal service capability to provide credible information for climate impacts analyses. For that, it has been coupled with detailed models of terrestrial hydrology, coastal ocean, crop growth, air quality, and recently expanding interactive water quality and ecosystem. Their outputs will form a scientific basis for decision makers to select optimal pathways to achieve economic, societal and environmental goals.