WRF User's Forum

We've just released WRF Domain Wizard 1.10:
http://wrfportal.org/DomainWizard.html

The main new feature is the namelist.input editor (and integrated eta level editor).

Here's a summary of what WRF Domain Wizard does:

WRF Domain Wizard is the successor to the WRFSI GUI and is a graphical user interface (GUI) for the new WRF Preprocessing System (WPS). It enables users to easily define and localize domains (cases) by selecting a region of the Earth and choosing a map projection. Users can also define nests using the nests editor, edit namelist.input, run the WPS programs (geogrid, ungrib, and metgrid) through the GUI, and visualize the NetCDF output. WRF Domain Wizard is also a built-in component of WRF Portal.

Note: we've also just released WRF Portal, a GUI for running WRF itself (both ARW and NMM):
http://wrfportal.org/WRFPortal.html

I'd like to take the opportunity to show my appreciation for this tool, it works great!


Some feedback/suggestions:

1) I experienced some small weirdnesses: for my parent domain with 8 km grid spacing I set '2m' for the geo input file resolution, but when adding a nest it was reset to '10m' (about 18 km). My input would finally be accepted if I select '2m', then save and exit the program (to be sure), then reload the domain and add the nest. Perhaps a future version could select automatically the geo resolution matching best with that of the model?

2) If I would like every day a different region but the same number of gridpoints, it would be convenient to be able to select a fixed number of x and y points and the distance between them. Then one can simply move these frames around and spend less time on resizing.

3) By the way, the geog file is huge (9.7 GB), one should be prepared for this when setting up a disk partition. Would it be possible in the future to download a selection of tiles instead?

4) The namelist editor is convenient, but one has to put in the correct dates manually. It should be possible with the selection of input files to automatically update this part. The d02 domain grid spacing should be added next to that of the parent domain, it did not accept my namelist without it. I assume the default is stored in a file, I will check which one.
Also the metgrid number of levels inserted automatically, when I selected vertical levels, is 50. It should be 48 in that case. (EDIT: this depends only on the input model data! GFS from NOMADS servers in my case)

5) The automatic vertical level generator has fewer options than I have seen in a previous SIGUI, do they come back eventually?

That said, I am already a very happy modeler with the current release
Oscar

Thank you for the kind words, Oscar.

(1) The nest editor sets "10m" as the default. Perhaps we can make it more intelligent in a future release.
(2) This would be a nice feature, but we might not have the "time" budget to address it.
(3) This is out of our control. You might contact the WRF developers about this.
(4) The namelist.input dates get set automatically if you use WRF Portal to do your runs. We use the default (included in the installation) WRF namelist.input files (the upcoming version will use different default files, depending on the grid point spacing). If you use the vertical editor (by clicking the button), you can set the number of levels to any value you wish.
(5) We might add more features to the vertical level editor in a future release.

Thanks again for the input!

-Jeff Smith

Earth System Research Lab / NOAA
Boulder, Colorado

We've just released an WRF Domain Wizard 1.21, which now supports WRF and WPS 3.

WRF Domain Wizard is included in WRF Portal here:
http://wrfportal.org/WRFPortal.html

Or you can run WRF Domain Wizard as a standalone application here:
http://wrfportal.org/DomainWizard.html

Best regards,
Jeff