UWBlog

Welcome to the UFS UW Team Blog

The UW Team will use this forum to communicate new and upcoming features and plans. We’ve made fantastic progress toward a set of tools for workflow unification across the UFS Apps. We call the package uwtools. You can always find an inventory of what we have available on the landing page of our Read the Docs page: https://uwtools.readthedocs.io/en/main/. There, you will also find links to documentation consistent with each of our release versions for comparison, as well as instructions on installing, running, and contributing.

We operate under the EPIC Program’s Scaled Agile Framework and plan our work about ten weeks at a time. We are starting Planning Increment (PI) 12 and want to share our plans with you. But first, let’s have a quick recap of what we did in PI 11.

We had two major accomplishments. The first was designing and building a series of tools we are calling drivers. You might think of a driver as a replacement for a run script. Its job is to create a run directory, provision it with all the input files needed for a given component (e.g. FV3, chgres_cube, MPAS) to run, and then execute the program. We use a graph-oriented approach when creating the drivers because it offers many advantages over the procedural style programming so often employed in legacy NWP scripts. We presented our preliminary work on these drivers at the UCAR SEA ISS Conference in Boulder in mid-April. Check out our slides in this PDF. A video recording will be posted here once it becomes available.

Second, we worked closely with NOAA GSL staff to build the first uwtools-based application from scratch. RRFS v2 is in the early stages of research to adopt the MPAS dycore and wanted an app that physics developers could reliably use to run case-study experiments, long-running retrospective experiments, and real-time runs during testbed experiments. The result was a new, usable MPAS App, developed in about three weeks. We still have features to add and improvements to make, but uwtools enabled us to move quickly toward a product that met the requirements of our GSL researchers.

In PI 12, we are excited to build the relationships between drivers that we often see in the UFS Apps – several drivers running in series as part of a single driver, expansion to support global forecasts in FV3 and MPAS drivers, and the coupling of multiple components that support earth-system modeling. We expect PI 12 will bring many new drivers to our growing collection.

In addition, we are committing to blogging (like this) more frequently and producing a video demonstration of how to use the drivers. We are also working with CU Boulder’s Computer Science Post-Baccalaureate Program to bring on a Summer student who will create a Binder-hosted, interactive Jupyter Notebook of examples in our repository.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions or comments about our plans or tools. We regularly monitor GitHub Discussions and Issues and want to work closely with our early adopters so we can make the best tools possible.

Christina Holt, Apr 22, 2024