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B4dWo1f edited this page May 12, 2021 · 4 revisions

This repo is an adaptation of a RASP system. These kind of systems, developed by Dr. John W. Glendening DrJack, are wrapper around the WRF model and include the setup for the input data, the WRF run and the post-processing of the output (which is anything but negligible!).

First, I think it is helpful to have a mental map of the whole process from the data collected by satellites and weather stations to our final regional prediction.

  1. Real world data is collected
  2. The data is fed to the GFS Model which produces a forecast for the next 16 days. This forecast has a spatial resolution of ~28km and it is served every 6 hours
  3. We run an instance of the WRF model, which includes steps:
    1. Download the data from the GFS servers
    2. Actually run WRF
  4. Post-process the data, calculating derived quantities that the WRF model does not provide directly
  5. Plot the results

This repo provides a way to automate the relevant steps and get a regional weather forecast.
*Note: if your internet connection is not great you can start downloading some big files that you'll need later on

WRF installation

The installation of the WRF model from souce can be a bit overwhelming at first glance, but it's actually quite simple. So worry not! We'll try to walk you through it (eventually, this is a work in progress wiki).

The instructions to install WRF can be found here. I strongly recommend following step by step the tutorial to compile, although in the next lines I'll address the key points for a successful installation in Ubuntu 20.04 and/or Debian 10 (the ones I've tried).

Dependencies

There are some obsolete old dependencies that are required for the WRF to work (maybe these could be updated to newer versions?), not to worry! they provide the packages and they are easy to install.

I've found most useful to install the WRF without sudo permission, provided that a few system-wide dependencies are met (which are completely reasonable and many systems will have them already installed). Make sure that your system has the following packages installed before the rest of the install

myuser@mycomputer:~$ sudo apt-get install gfortran cpp gcc csh m4

After this, sudo privileges should not be necessary

Download Mandatory data

The WPS requires some physical properties of the world, you can download them from here. Notice that the high resolution files are ~3Gb (30Gb upon unzip)

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