Project Summary
Testing and verification of the WRF Model: extreme weather over eastern China. The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model is a new numerical weather prediction (NWP) model that has been developed jointly by a number of research, operational, and educational institutions in the United States, including the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA), and the Center for the Analysis and Prediction of Storms (CAPS) at the University of Oklahoma.

The WRF Model is designed to be extremely flexible and powerful over applications that range from fundamental atmospheric research to operational weather prediction. Global interest in the model has grown quickly, especially in eastern Asia. For example, the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences (CAMS) of the Chinese Meteorological Administration (CMA) is currently using the architecture and coding conventions of the WRF Model as templates during the development of their own NWP model known as the Global/Regional Assimilation and Prediction Enhanced System (GRAPES).

In 2002, NCAR and CAMS decided to collaborate on the development and testing of their respective NWP models. A component of this effort is to assess the WRF Model's ability to simulate extreme weather on a broad range of scales over eastern China. Phenomena of interest include mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) that form downwind of the Tibetan Plateau and inundate communities in eastern China with torrential rain. Some of these MCSs are associated with mesoscale convective vortices (MCVs).

During the 2nd NCAR/CAMS Joint Workshop on NWP Model Development in spring of 2003, scientists from the U.S. and China established the initial steps in this collaboration. The first of these steps is to choose for concentrated study a few cases of extreme weather that coincided with scientific field campaigns, in the hope that unusually rich observations made during the campaigns might aid efforts to evaluate the realism of model simulations. Researchers are currently selecting candidate cases.

Principal Investigators:

• Chris Davis


• Jason Knievel


• Curriculum Vitae


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• Email

• Shen Xueshun


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• Shen Yuanfang


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• Wang Shiyu


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• Huang Liping


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• Xu Guoqiang


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• Yang Xuesheng


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• 2nd NCAR/CAMS Joint Workshop on NWP Model Development Chinese Meteorological Agency - PDF
• 2nd NCAR/CAMS Joint Workshop on NWP Model Development Chinese Meteorological Agency - DOC